Lewes Musical Express

LEWES musical express Issue Four Winter 2014

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John Agard Desert Island hero

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The Arthur Max MezzowaveLambrettas Brown

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Inside this issue:

Duncan Con Disorderly Club p10 p12

News p8

Baroque ‘n’ Roll p26

rock Readers We have Derek Haggar thank for these two great pictures of the legendary Ray Davies of The Kinks and Ian McCulloch of Echo & The Bunnymen. They are both reading the LME in sunny splendour in Spain. Ray was appearing at the Heineken Jazzaldia Festival on July 23rd and Derek was there as his guitar tech. The day they were leaving, Ian arrived for his gig on the 24th. Derek reliably reports that they both loved the paper. More musical legend readers to come in future issues.

Oral history of the Lewes music scene of the late 60s, early 70s.

John Eccles [The Rouser], Sussex Express, June 2000 hese quotes come from an interview with the late John Whippy – one of the most talented and best-loved musicians on the scene he describes.

He never did get round to compiling the rock family tree but we have inherited the task and, over several months, with the generous help and local knowledge of Flo Flowers, we have spent what must be hundreds of hours conducting interviews, doing research and pulling together photos and memorabilia from this period to bring you some sense of the atmosphere of this interesting time in Lewes’ musical history.

It is far from definitive. As with our previous look at the set of key gigs at the Town Hall in the ‘60s – featuring bands like the Pink Floyd and The Move – there were many bands and musicians we couldn’t identify at the time.

Reader feedback has enabled us to fill in many of the

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From left: John Whippy, Paul Skinner and Nick Patching.

Photo courtesy Graham Frost

JOHN WHIPPY John Whippy quipped: “I probably hold the record for missing more opportunities than anybody has a right to!” He played for short periods with virtually all the main bands in Lewes.

Most of the musicians we spoke to from that period had a good word to say about him.

Robin Steadman says: ‘John Whippy was, in my view, head and shoulders above the rest of the local guitarists. He

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had a tough, blues style and picked up on a wide variety of influences.’

Nick Patching: ‘There were lots of good guitarists in Lewes but John always led the pack. He was a naturally gifted guitarist and a great guy who had a wicked cutting sense of humour.’

Pete Thomas: ‘John Whippy was nice. He was basically our Eric Clapton.

He looked a bit like Eric and he could play ‘Strange Brew’.

In 1978, John gave up playing guitar and became a director of Clothkits which, for many years, was a very successful business in the town. It was 1988 when, by chance, he spotted an ad for a ‘competent guitarist to join gigging R&B band’ and went for an audition. Another guitarist Phil Greaves also turned up. They both had black Les Pauls and played ‘I Can’t Quit You’. As a result, they were both hired for the band Otis Lift & The Elevators, which featured Alan ‘Otis’ Dodds as harp player and frontman, playing jump blues and swing.

John told Blues In Britain magazine: ‘When Otis left in Jan 1999, we basically took stock of where we were and we found that everyone except Otis was frustrated by the feeling that we’d

Courtesy/ Graham Frost

“There were an extraordinary group of people playing in Lewes bands around the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, all springing from pupils at the Grammar/Priory school. It was a real hotbed atmosphere. So many bands were around in Lewes at the time that I was thinking about compiling a Lewes rock-and-roll family tree There was a genuinely exceptional music scene which produced a lot of success stories from such a small, intense group of musicians.”

drifted too far away from the roots of the blues. I’d sung occasional backing vocals up to that point, but suddenly found myself in the role of singer and frontman.’

John continued playing with the band for the next six years before being diagnosed with the brain tumour that led to his death in 2006. The Elevators, with new front man Fran Galpin, continue to play great blues to this day.

Bellowhead founder members Jon Boden (left) and John Spiers (right) serenade the pulling of the pint by Andy Mellon.

SUSSEX UNIVERSITY BELLOWHEAD MUSICAL RECHARGE REVIVAL le and folk music have always gone down well together but Bellowhead – Britain’s biggest traditional folk band both in terms of sales and due to the fact that they have 11 members – have upped the ante by teaming up with Harvey’s to brew a brand new golden ale, named

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Bellowhead claim to be the first musical act to brew their own beer, having previously produced ‘Hedonism’ – an ale named after their 2010 album – with the Potbelly micro-brewery in Kettering, Northamptonshire.

Since then several other bands have

or those with long memories, Sussex like most other major universities in the country, formed a network of venues that put on the greatest bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

‘Live At Leeds’ by The Who was just one of those stand-out events. Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and many other great bands played at Sussex. In later years, the Gardner Arts Centre played host to some wonderful bands and artists but, for many years, all musical activity at Sussex ceased.

Happily Mike Gray and colleagues have taken up the challenge of reinvigorating the University’s musical activities and, for starters, they staged a one-day festival at various venues on campus in October as Mike reports: ‘The first ever Sussex Festival was a success. After five months of organising, endlessly emailing countless people and working with the union to agree a budget, we managed to pull off a day that showed the incredible creative talent that Sussex has to offer.

‘The bars were packed with students and staff there to support the hard work of the various societies

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Photos: John Warburton

‘Revival’ after the title of their latest album. Currently touring the country on their 10th Anniversary tour, the band will also be playing after-show sessions at local pubs that have Revival on tap. This will be the first Harvey’s beer to be distributed nationally; in its 224-year history, the brewery has traditionally restricted its distribution to pubs within an 80-mile radius of the brewery.

followed suit – including Elbow (‘Charge’ with Marston’s at Burton-on Trent), Madness (‘Gladness’ with the Growler Brewery) and Iron Maiden (‘Trooper’ with Robinsons) – but Bellowhead and Harveys are doing things on a much bigger scale.

The LME were present at Revival’s launch event in Harvey’s yard together with a good crowd of wellwishers and ale drinkers who consumed the new beer with enthusiasm.

Music was provided by the band’s two founder members John Boden and John Spiers on fiddle and accordion. To everyone’s delight they were joined by John, Jill & Jon of the Copper family for several numbers. Brendan Kelly, the band’s Brighton-based sax player did sterling work at the pumps of Harvey’s mobile hop bar.

At the event’s end, the three Bellowheads along with their trumpet player Andy Mellon, jumped aboard Harvey’s marvellous horse-drawn dray for a musical journey round town delivering the new ale.

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John, Jon and Jill of the Copper family join Jon and John for a jolly sing-song.

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and performers including poets, folk singers, magicians, the university Show Choir and the Swing Society, who got everybody up and dancing.

‘Events at the IDS Café Bar went especially well and provided some of the most intimate and touching

performances. Falmer Bar provided an array of bands across all genres, from the heavier sound of Illegal Download to the frivolous covers of The Alley Cats and the original sound of The Levity.

‘Mandela Hall was awesome. We spent over £1000 on hiring a stage, security and sound equipment, and it was well worth it. We saw some absolutely amazing acts, with Kings Mews taking the whole place by storm. The crowd had thinned out by the end demonstrating that Sussex students can't take late nights. It wouldn't have been like that in the Sixties!

‘The after-party, run by the Bangin' Lemz Crew did not disappoint. Free lemons and juicy beats engulfed the Falmer Back Bar, and we can't wait to see what else they get involved with in the future.

‘We have learnt a vast amount from this event, and are excited to start putting together next year’s festival, which will naturally be bigger and better. We also made £400 profit to be reinvested in future events.’

Contact: www.facebook.com/ ssxrecords

EwordsLEjohn may im Zam Zim is one of the most significant recordings to come out of the upsurge of musical activity in Lewes in recent years. It is a genuine collaboration between Arthur Brown – the distinguished elder of psychedelia and theatrical rock – and two of the brightest sparks of a much younger generation – Sam Walker ( a fine drummer, multi-instrumentalist and original thinker) and Jim Mortimore (engineer, producer, one of the founder organisers of Starfish, musical director of The Moulettes and much more).

“I had been working with Arthur on and off for about ten years, “ says Jim, “and around 2011 he came to me and said he wanted to put a younger band together to play the original Crazy World material and I said we’d also need something new to put out. So we started collecting songs, grooves and ideas. I’m not a songwriter or a lyricist but I’m good at creating the sound palette for the songs, good at getting the best out of players and I have good mixing and production skills.”

“Arthur texted me reams and reams of lyrics until my phone was full of incredible lines,” says Sam. “Jim and I beavered away on riffs and melodic ideas and, at my little studio in Laughton, we literally smashed ideas together. On the record I played drums and percussion, a bit of guitar and keyboards and did backing vocals and lots of sound effects including kazoos and blowing down cardboard tubes.

“We really wanted to get a heavy groove that leaned towards the Now but also paid homage to what Arthur had done in the past. The beats that come out of the whole dance side of things are much fatter than when Arthur started making records.

“We had different influences and sounds because we’re from different generations but it all came together and we realised we were all on the same page.”

Lots of the idea were hatched in Seb’s rehearsal room at the Foundry Studio and videos and writing sessions were held at Zu Studios. They did an intense 10 days recording at Yellow Fish working with engineer Phil Brown. Many of the tracks were recorded live and numerous other musicians added additional parts to the mix. For instance, the strings on a track called ‘Assan’ were recorded at the Moulettes’ house in Brighton in Hannah’s bedroom.

By the way, the album – which Arthur says is his 26th – stands as a great example of a successful crowdfunded project through Kickstarter which raised around £16,000.

Both Sam and Jim have nothing but good words to say about both the recording process and Arthur himself: Sam: “Arthur is just the most amazing person to collaborate with. He’s so open to any idea and trying out anything. I think he’s just one of the most open and adventurous people I’ve ever met. He is a true adventurer in real life and he also is the character Zim Zam Zim, wandering through the world of amazingness, looking the storm in the eye, where world war, Uber Big Business and climate change are going on

EartworkLEpaul harrison So without there being a specific jm story, is it that each track is part of the

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journey through different states of mind?

It’s the time when the waters have risen, the ice caps have melted, there’s little land left and everybody’s fighting over it. This character Zim Zam Zim harvests the seas but he’s found what appears to be a kind of outgrowth.

We’re not quite sure if he’s found it or developed it. It’s an interaction between the human mind and all the ley lines and everything which has created a spontaneous arising of this kind of spherical bubble which contains the formlessness at the root of all matter.

Many of the normal people who enter it disintegrate. When he enters the bubble, he is able to reform himself and understand life in a different sense. He realises there is a time when the world is not going to be salvageable and that this bubble is something you can manipulate and manoeuvre out of the planet. So he is summoning other people to come with him.

Wow! That’s far out Arthur.

Yeah, it’s a bit fucking Sci-Fi.

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Want to Love

This has got a Chinese feel to it jm and I love those tones at the end. It’s

Arthur, Sam& Jim link the Crazy World and

the Now with explosive results ‘You’ve got to hold a vision in your heart Let the vision come from where we all start Before a big bang Before conditions begin In the formless depths of Zim Zam Zim’

Zim Zam Zim

alongside massive positive things as well.

We just tried to capture Arthur’s incredible energy and power because he’s still so powerful, vital and fresh as a performer and a vocalist and makes people sit up and listen a bit.”

Jim: “When you meet Arthur when he’s not performing he’s kind of Gandalf-like but as soon as he gets on stage it’s like WOW – the energy just comes out.”

The last words rest with Arthur.

“We looked at what Rick Rubin had done with Johnny Cash. Rubin said to him that nobody wants to hear your happy Christian songs, they want to hear you low-down and dirty, singing about how to survive in this horrible world that we’re surrounded by. That was Johnny getting back to his roots. So I thought that maybe, at the age of 72, I could go back and look at my roots – the psychedelia, drama, characters and atmosphere of the Crazy World album which contained light and darkness. We decided it wasn’t worth compromising and we just decided we’d do what comes out.

So it was that Arthur came round to the LME HQ and I listened to the album for the first time and discussed it with him – track by track.

Oh my goodness! That’s a jm no-holds-barred opener. I got the impression you’d let wild animals into the studio.

Actually I think wild animals were moving all the sliders as well.

So it’s like a cross between those big Babylonian horns they used to play in Cecil B. De Mille movies and ‘The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy’.

Would that be fair to say? So we’re setting the scene for the album and you are the High Priest announcing the state of affairs.

Yes, you could call it a High Priest, but, of course, he wouldn’t like to be called that. It’s a voice that other people might see as an authority, but he himself would actually be hoping that they were going to arrive in the same place that he’s in. So it’s not like they have to worship him as the leader because they are the same as he is.

So you are summoning everybody to come?

Yeah, that’s a good one John. It’s a summoning. And I will say that three young ladies heard it and said “Far out !

Drum and Bass!” (laughing).

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very strong and your voice is in exceptionally fine form. It’s also a thought-provoking track which seems very contemporary in the sense that it starts with the concept of damaged children.

It kind of arose originally out of a time in the early ‘90s when I was working in a crisis centre in Texas and just seeing the horrendous things that happen and finding a way to be able to bring some hope.

Zim Zam Zim is inviting the damaged character to enter the sphere to be healed and find a resolution for their problems. Once they’ve done that, there’s no difference between him and them so everybody who goes through it becomes Zim Zam Zim. It’s not a loose simile for communism (laughing). This is the song where Jim already had that loop, and it just happened that this song that I’d worked on fitted it.

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Jungle Fever

Again no punches are pulled with jm this one. It’s like a cross between Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Tom Waits.

Screamin’ Jay does definitely reside at the root of your work. What is that instrument the one that sounds like a thumb piano?

It’s actually a mutated guitar played live.

Is this track also part of your Texan experience because I believe you’ve probably witnessed snake-handling ceremonies and episodes like that. It has some feeling of the Deep South in there.

Yes there are still churches where to prove that you love Jesus you have to bend down very quickly and pick up these two rabid snakes that want to bite you and you’ve gotta get them to show the Lord’s power.

This track represents another un-regenerated character who has found his way back to civilization from the Heart of Darkness.

It’s scary. If I was listening to this

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at night I would have to have some candles burning.

The Unknown

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This has a very nice sort of Gypsy Jazz rhythm to it with echoes of calypso and some quite dense lyrics about a future full of solarpowered things.

It’s looking at many of the current trends like the internet. We’re technospiders who are weaving this web that we hope is going to catch us when we fall. When Zim Zam Zim goes into the bubble and is disassembled he says: “I know the Unknown and the Unknown knows me.”

That’s a nice paradox. We’re certainly on a journey.

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Assun

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Wow, that’s a very tender and beautiful track Arthur. The term ‘rock opera is not necessarily considered a complimentary term but when I closed my eyes and listened to that I definitely saw a big operatic set. What was the inspiration for that?

Originally it was the name of a very beautiful Spanish lady that I was with. Of course it morphed into one of the things that Zim Zam Zim goes through and it’s about love between two people, in this case a man and a woman.

Having experienced the first tracks which are pretty full on, we reach this very tranquil spot.

Yes and just so that we don’t get too satisfied with that the next one comes on.

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Muscle of love

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This is like a wine tasting and what I’m getting is New Orleans Mardi Gras grotesques and flashes of David Cronenberg’s ‘The Naked Lunch’. There’s some wonderful lyrics. I liked “Kundalini meanie” and “You don’t wear no hat, don’t wear no gloves, all you wear is your muscle of love”. That’s particularly good. I visualised a huge grotesque muscular figure with very tiny pants on which I took to be a comment on the bombastic and preposterous nature of the male.

That’s exactly what I thought John (laughing), even to the extent of tantric teachings and all of that. One of the things for me that was an underpinning throughout the album was that the original human nature is the original human nature. We seem to want this person or that person to tell us what it is but that’s who we are already. It’s the same with sex. Instead of being normally sexual, we want someone to tell us this great theory of how if we shag in a certain way then, wow, we are blessing the whole world.

That’s a form of egotism beyond belief.

So it was a comment on that as well.

You are a person who has long journeyed through a considerable number of spiritual disciplines. So you are coming from the position of having experienced many of those things of which you are speaking.

Yes. They are very beautiful and they are very wonderful but what they have to do with the true nature of sex, love, or whatever else you want to talk about, that’s another thing.

So it’s as much a comment on jm people trying to tell you what true

you think he has a dog? jm Do Ha! Not a poodle! He’s probably ab stolen Bill Sykes’ dog [‘Bull’s Eye’]

sexuality is or how one should behave.

I’m the guru and you must learn from me, sort of thing?

Exactly.

You are saying it’s inherent in our nature and we should just accept who we are?

Yes, this is deep stuff in between the grooves.(laughing)

Light Your Light

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I don’t know quite what to say jm about this. It seemed like it was going

to resolve into something approaching a pop song, but then it went somewhere else. What would you say was your inspiration? What were you referencing in that? Men and women again?

And a kind of love that’s beyond just two parts.

On one level?

It was a kind of a tangential thing.

I went down to Portugal for about four years and stayed with this woman and as in the last verse: ‘She took me far beyond the shores of my dreams’. It’s a parallel to what happens with Zim Zam Zim if you like.

So it has resonances of the Algarve and the crashing waves of the Atlantic?

It does and how they kind of mirror consciousness which is not what one would expect.

There’s a touch of a choir

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Junkyard King

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So is that a voice of anger and dissatisfaction of someone who is living among the detritus of humanity?

Yeah, there’s a lot of young people who live in places like that – the centre of Detroit, for example.

The heap is kind of a symbol for whatever you want.

Although, with ingenuity, the detritus can be transformed into magnificent objects.

Or palaces can be built out of it.

But he doesn’t sound like he’s building palaces He just sounds very pissed off with the world.

He’s one of the characters who hasn’t gone through the change yet.

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somewhere in the background suggesting some sort of astral travel.

Well it cuts across all of the dimensions.

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Touched by All

“Touched by all and by none”. It jm sounds a bit like the headlines of today.

The dogs of war are unleashed. The instrumentation is interesting as it’s got that sort of African Ethiopique horn sound, if you know what I mean.

Yes. That riff was one where Sam woke up one morning, we had gone through the poem section of it and he woke up and said “I’ve got the end!”

Where it suddenly breaks into a second part?

Yes it’s the release from what’s holding the dogs of war and it flies after that.

If you close your eyes, this music provokes many thoughts and images, without being too specific. It suggests something without being too dogmatic about what the actual meaning is. I am asking you in some cases what it means.

Your voice has many voices and its an outstanding feature of this track.

Yes, I’ve never sung like that before. It came out spontaneously in the sessions.

I’ve interviewed John Tomlinson, the wonderful world-famous bass opera singer, who discovered he had that voice when he was about 15. He was carrying this massive, extraordinarily powerful voice, and you have something of the same. You could easily have had a career in opera do you think? Apart from your own nature shall we say? You’ve got a massive octave range, but also the power, and many different voices within that to play with.

I did take classical lessons for about a year and a half and the guy who taught me had a voice that was as big as Kings Cross Station. He was a big man. Each of his lungs was bigger than my whole body just about. Also, while I do love a lot of classical music, the things that I really love performing are on the more rhythmic side of things.

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There was a moment on the track Want To Love where Arthur had the lyrics and melody and Jim already had a really heavy groove and we realised that putting them together would create the real sound. That was the AHA! moment.

Touched By All encapsulated the really eclectic boundary for me between the now and eternity that I think we were trying to go for as a sound. An indefinable sound that’s really exciting because of its eclectic grooves and mixture of elements.

The Unknown was inspired by Ernest Ranglin’s ‘Below The Bassline’ with Monty Alexander – one of our favourite albums.

Jungle Fever – It was a special and memorable night when we recorded that.

We’d been to have dinner in a restaurant round the corner and we came back and did about four takes. It was really hard to pick which take would go on the album because every single performance from Arthur was amazing.

Sam Walker (left) and Jim Mortimore (right) snapped in Hamburg whilst on a recent European tour.

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The Formless Depths of Zim Zam Zim

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Was that the Steam Train to Hell at the end there?

Yeah, that’s good. The steam train to Hell (laughing) I think you may have invented some sort of new genre here with this record. One way of talking about it might be to call it Psychedelic Primitivism.

Very nice John, I like that.

Psychedelic Primitivism in the sense that listening to that last track we could have been listening to some ethnographic field recording from around the camp fire of the Hutu tribe, or something of that nature. But then these recordings got mixed up with some off-cuts from an early Captain Beefheart record, some recordings of steam trains, and an accident in the kitchen. Its very powerful and original and its been a privilege to discuss your work track by track. CF

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www.arthur-brown.com

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Left: Album cover features Max’s car, a Consul Classic 315, made by Ford in the UK from 1961-1963. Below: Max inside his solar-powered trailer.

MAX MEZZOWAVE/WHO ARE YOU? It’s a sunny afternoon of blue sky and white clouds and I’m sitting in a field in Max Mezzowave’s trailer listening to a Charlie Mingus vinyl album through a fine quality hi-fi and speakers, powered off-grid by a small wind rotor and two solar panels, whilst gazing out at a panoramic view of the South Downs.

We’re talking generally about his musical life and times, a peripatetic 47year journey that’s taken him from his childhood in Stoke-on-Trent to this chilled musical HQ and particularly about his latest album of what he calls ‘cinematic soul’, entitled ‘Who Are You’ – a beautiful piece of work that took almost a decade to come to fruition and received a rapturous reception at its live launch at The Foundry in Lewes at the end of October.

Max was noodling about on the piano from the age of five and, by the age of 14, had passed the Royal College of Music Grade 7 exam, although he hated school and piano lessons and often skipped practice. By 16, when he left school, he’d been in several bands, had started writing music and having learnt to read music, was now playing by ear.

Through a youth opportunity scheme, he got his first chance to work in a recording studio in Dale End, Birmingham, with some black dudes including members of the reggae band Aswad. Through that he met rock and blues vocalist Debbie Bonham, sister of Led Zep’s John Bonham, who was looking for a keyboard player and he moved from the Midlands to London.

When he wasn’t gigging he worked for a company called Hilton Sound, delivering music equipment to studios all over the city including ‘Top of the Pops’. One advantage was he got to use the equipment at off-peak times.

By the early ‘90s he had an Atari computer and was producing experimental electronic music which led him to get signed by Mute Records for the export label, producing 12-inch grooves under a variety of monikers

including The Comical Brothers (geddit) and working with Dave Simmonds of Fad Gadget and Lene Lovich. He then moved in the mid-’90s into producing unusual cerebral electronic music using Indian scales under the name Chaitanya, which proved a hit with key figures in the Asian underground like Talvin Singh. His debut album ‘The Hub’ (2001) was widely praised for its dramatic soundscapes and meditative quality and is still regarded as an ambient classic.

He moved to Brighton the following year and started doing some live gigs with a variety of musicians doing support gigs at the Dome with artists

The album launch at The Foundry Gallery on 24th October was a groovy success.

Angie Brown was too ill to attend but Lewes-based Alison David carried the show with real star quality. Band also featured Tristan Banks (drums), Darron Parrott (bass guitar), Carlos Fortin (guitar), Chez Grimble (sax), Yaron Stavi (double bass), Helen Kane (trumpet) and main man Max (keyboards). Great light show

by Tamsin Carter.

like Joan Armatrading and Carleen Anderson. He also earned a living producing musical themes and idents for Sony PlayStation, Google Broadcast and a Channel 4 documentary on Damien Hirst.

When he became homeless, he relocated to a deserted mill in Hertfordshire owned by one of his friend’s parents and began composing tracks and ideas that, over a long period, evolved into the makings of ‘Who Are You?’ which features the wonderful voices of Angie Brown, Lifford Shillingford and Alison David.

Rather than getting sucked into technology, much of the album was

~ Monday to Friday 8.30am – 5.30pm ~ ~ Saturday 8.30am – 5pm, Sunday & Bank Holiday 10am – 4pm ~ Café and Produce Store selling Organic and Fair Trade products.

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Hampers for all occasions. ~ 4 Lansdown Place, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 2JT ~ 01273 478817 ~ ~ www.laportes.co.uk ~ laporteslewes@gmail.com ~ 6

created live rather than simulated. He did small gigs to road test some of the material, including a ‘Supernatural Solstice’ event at St John sub Castro in Lewes where he met the rock and roll vicar Peter Owen Jones, who invited him to do similar events at the church in Firle.

The long time spent finessing the various grooves on his new album has paid off and a measure of that is the fact that it is being released on the Big Chill label. It’s a stone cold classic which confirms Max Mezzowave’s reputation as composer, player, producer and groovemaster. www.mezzowave.co.uk CF

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atching up with Stevie in the brick basement (mind your head!) office of Union Store and there’s a lot to report.

Stevie is now Chair of the Americana Music Association UK and she and Jamie attended the Nashville Americana Music Awards.

Working in association with the British Underground – an organisation involved in promoting the export of UK music – they ran a couple of showcases for their signed act Police Dog Hogan.

They also incidentally attended the Award Show itself. There was a stellar house band including Ry Cooder & his son with Don Was on bass backing such talents as Taj Mahal, Roseanne Cash, Loretta Lynn and Jackson Browne.

Quite a night!

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Stevie and Jamie with Bob Harris in Nashville

Live at the All Saint’s.

Photo: John Warburton

POLICE DOG HOGAN WESTWARD HO! nion Music Store arranged the launch of this album with confidence, by booking All Saints and pricing tickets at a premium price. A lively and large crowd was evidence not only of the band's following but also the relevance of their songs.

Whereas many bands apply an artistic veneer over the ordinary lives of their songwriters, Police Dog Hogan's songs just rip the veneer right off again with humour and musical quality.

What else does one say about a band whose merch includes not only T-shirts but comically garish (and practical) tea-towels, as if someone boldly ticked the wrong box on the "souvenirs'R'us" website?

‘Westward Ho!’, the title, should give purchasers a clue to the mild, clever satire that runs through much of this album. The village that gave its name to the CD is a

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fake West Country construction designed to give pleasure in front of a thin facade, and many of the lyrics appeal to listeners who seek a greater depth to their songs, despite acknowledging that most daily life is invariably shallow.

In the mostly acoustic line-up of this seven-piece band, with resonances of The Waterboys' early recordings, there is richness from the variety of instruments employed; from skillful folk-violin playing, through percussion, guitars and a banjo, to the accordion and an accurate brass section of one. High production values help achieve a variety of textures on the record, from sparse instrumentation to a wall of multi-tracked sound. When this tightly-organised force is thrown at lyrics such as "A Man Needs A Shed", "No Wonder She Drinks" and "Home Is Where They Have To Let You In", entertainment is the result. Police Dog Hogan have a particular skill: to soften one's audience with humour, and then strike for the heart with painful meaning. policedoghogan.com CF

The best in-store show of 2014: The Magic Numbers on 19th August.

Photo: Bob Russell

Union’s big Christmas show at the All Saint’s on December 20th features the wonderful Moulettes of which more in our next issue and they’re planning to stage two or three gigs a month at the Con Club. These include the following: February: Jeffery Foucault (Groovy Americana from South of the USA).

March: Rosco Levee & The Southern Slide (from Kent via The Allman Brothers); O’Hooley & Tidour (fab BBC folk-nominated duo); Summat’s Brewing (’Oh Good Ale’); Anna Teixeira (solo show by Portugese/Canadian multiinstrumentalist from the band Po’ Girl) The Union Label is putting out a second album from the Self-Help Group and a debut album by Brightonbased duo Lucas & King due out in the Spring. You can hear their track ‘Folk Is Not A Rude Word’ on Mixcloud.com CF

EreviewLEjohn warburton

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PAUL HARRISON’S XPIANO t is one thing to play an instrument, quite another to invent one and use it to create beautiful music. The everingenious Paul Harrison, a bricoleur par excellence who created the Flamelight and can turn his hand to anything including sign writing, set designing and decorative painting has done just that with the Xpiano.

Before being ensconced in the Phoenix Quarter, Paul had a studio under the giant railway viaduct in Brighton and when a nearby piano shop closed down and he found a skip full of old pianos he decided to do a bit of salvage. Unable to get the whole piano up the stairs, he stripped one of its casing, keys and moving parts and retained just the harp-like frame and set of 300 strings and the pedals.

Using a piano-tuning wrench, he retuned all the strings by ear, converting all the white notes to black notes to create one enormous open chord and then sat down for hour upon hour experimenting at

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making different sounds, harmonics and overtones by picking and strumming the chords, damping the strings and striking them with a range of objects including bicycle spokes and hand-made beaters.

Right from the off he started recording his musical experiments, first using cassettes then minidiscs and then a computer with Logic Pro. Being an ingenious man, he fitted it into the back of his truck and took it out busking every weekend, selling hundreds of CDs to passers-by enchanted by the wistful and imaginative sounds Paul coaxed out of his unique instrument.

There things might have ended except that a company called Production Music Online, who provide music for film, tv and advertising soundtracks, heard Paul’s Xpiano music, and were so enthusiastic that they took and tweaked 52 tracks, put them into surround sound and have been successfully licensing them literally around the world. They have been used for a tv programme called ‘Nature’s Wierdest Events’, for an Australian sci-fi tv channel and, most recently, for the trailer music for the popular BBC series ‘The Voice’.

Paul keeps a book of appreciative quotes from people who have heard him do live performances. One reads: ‘Never before have I heard anything quite so majestic.’

You can hear some of the tracks on xpianoorchestra on MySpace, or on www.productionmusiconline.com/ composer_Paul-Harrison_166.html Email Paul: xpianobrighton@yahoo.co.uk CF

MYRISTICA

yristica is the musical persona of Mei-Ling Grey, the daughter of a Royal Navy father and a Singaporean mother – who met in their teens and are still happily together. As a small toddler, Mei-Ling loved to make noises on a piano and her childhood fascination was such that she had a proper electric keyboard by the age of 12 and was already developing her own original compositions.

She dabbled with being the keyboardist with a 6th form college rock band (variously named Spent Wolf, Miasma and The Immortal) but returned to her solo work and was encouraged to pursue it in the ‘90s by Colin Angus of The Shamen – a Scottish psychedelic-influenced electronic dance music band from Aberdeen – whose track ‘Move Any Mountain’ was a huge talismanic

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motivator, encouraging Mei-Ling to believe she could achieve anything.

Music took a back stop when she was bringing up her two kids (now aged 11 and 15) but she returned to it, following her marriage separation when, in 2011, she developed a rare form of cancer. She had always been drawn to the sacred and spiritual aspects of music but now it became an important force for healing. In those difficult days, she says, she wrapped herself in her own musical blanket.

Through SoundCloud, she released a five-track collection that gained her a huge following in a short amount of time as it spidered out across the web and linked her to many kindred spirits.

After finishing her radiotherapy, she says she was fortunate enough to meet Asher Quinn, an experienced spirituallyfocused musician, who produced her first album ‘To The Moon & Stars’ and paid to have it mastered.

Released on the Singing Stone label, Asher also encouraged her to play live

for the first time at a yoga centre, and she sold £80 of CDs on that one night.

Another album emerged and was dedicated to her young son – the ‘Little Oak’ of the title – to give him the strength to overcome his nervousness at moving to his new secondary school.

Her daughter’s maths teacher plays it to the kids to help them concentrate during classwork.

Further encouragement and collaboration came from multi-instrumentalist Phil Thornton who played on and mastered her latest recording ‘Waiting For Yesterday’, a title she said came to her in a dream. It’s dedicated to her father and its inspiration is about wanting to relieve happy moments from the past.

Based in East Hoathly, Mei-Ling continues to reach out and touch a broad audience from many walks of life with her contemporary piano music that chills, heals and inspires. Now in remission, she continues to compose and is starting to play live ‘living-room concerts’ for interested parties. www.myristicamusic.com CF

EreviewLEjohn warburton

THE HALO PROJECT — SOLGARD n their liner notes, members of The Halo Project write that their past performances include the work of 1980s big-hairera bands such as Toto and the even earlier long-hair Fleetwood Mac. But, on this record, the substance and the style have not been confused. What mattered most about those bands, more than thirty years ago, was the quality of their musicianship and production, never mind the huge shirt collars.

Their musical skills were

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songwriter's intentions for the band's mostly acoustic palette accurately, and we wait until track 8, ‘Soldier Song’, for a solo electric guitar to make a subtle, utterly musically appropriate, entrance. Its novelty helps to raise the roof as this number fills the loudspeakers. There is even a nod to prog-rock traditions toward the album's close as the songs ‘Hourglass’ and ‘Puppet Master’ merge to form an angry suite.

It is difficult to find much about the writers or performers outside their own website, where all lyrics are generously given away to listeners, but The Halo Project have clearly launched their collective folk-rock career with harmony and maturity, not to mention lyrics that hint, in disguise, to the mythology of northern Europe. An orchestra, employed even more subtly than Louis Clark brought to another folk-rock band Renaissance, would benefit their next recording. www.thehaloproject.com From Union Music Store and their website. CF

timeless qualities unashamedly embraced by The Halo Project in their mythology-tinged, lushly harmonized album.

If the qualities exhibited by this album are replicated in the band's live performances, this is certainly an ensemble to enjoy. Their hallmark is an almost constant three-part vocal harmony blessed by voices of quality that are never too individual, even in songs such as ‘Choose Your God’ that, otherwise, would be a soloist's power-pop showcase. Talent shows also in the songwriting, where the joyful (to this reviewer) return of the "middle eight" provides relief from the "all-hook" examples in today's mainstream charts. An extraordinarily mature recording technique reveals the

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You’re never too old to rock ‘n’ roll it seems judging by the news from two local bands.

THE LEAKY BUCKETS he story of The Leaky Buckets begins back in 1967 when Keith Eade and John Robinson first met whilst working for the VSO in Dar-es-Salaam, the then capital of Tanzania in East Africa. Keith had played drums in The Moonrakers, a Brighton youth club band, until he had a bad motorcycle accident and lost his left leg. John had always wanted to play the guitar but his father wouldn’t pay for lessons because he thought it was not a proper musical instrument. They decided to form a band when they returned to the UK the following year and named it The Leaky Buckets but it was not to be. Instead they went their separate ways, developed busy careers, got married and had children.

It was forty years later when Keith retired from a career teaching Rural Science and returned to live in Peacehaven that he met up with John again, who’d been running the family farm in Iford.

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In 2008 John retired to make the time to learn the guitar properly and they have now realised their original dream with the help of Steve Myall on bass, Reid Savage on guitar, Max Mezzowave on keyboards and main vocals, with additional vocals by May Robinson, John’s youngest daughter. They’ve now played a number of local gigs and their EP ‘Never Going Back’ contains both covers and original songs.

It is available free for a limited time. www.leakybuckets.co.uk CF

THE HUSTLERS ollowing last issues coverage of ‘60s concerts at Lewes Town Hall, the LME was contacted by Lewesian Pete Dresch of The Hustlers. This band formed initially as a trio in Brighton in 1960 and two years later evolved into a quintet featuring Tony Burchell (vocals), Barry Gillam (guitar), Richard Pearce (bass), Pete Dresch (rhythm guitar) and Ken White (drums). Their last gig was on the 24th April 1965

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but some five years ago the original members reunited and have since played many gigs, the latest being at Ovingdean Village Hall in September, which raised £1000 for The Martlets Hospice. The band has an average age of 72 and have a repertoire of more than one hundred songs from the late ‘50s by artists like Rick Nelson, Elvis, Gene Vincent, Cliff Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly. www.thehustlers.org.uk CF

EwordsLEjohn may ‘Music has the power to change someone’s day for the better. When people are really loving what they do and putting their energy into it, they are sharing something positive with the world. You can feel that energy when you hear them play.’

DUNCAN DISORDERLY

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Based in Lewes since 2012, Duncan and his current band The Scallywags – featuring Duncan (guitar), Sara Hendrix (mandolin), Gus Dolding (gypsy guitar), Robin May (bass), Finbar Babushka (percussion) with Matt Dugdale, their sound engineer – created their own studio on the Phoenix estate and recorded their first album there which was issued on their own Good Times label. They’ve had a busy summer on the festival circuit spreading the good vibrations and living the alternative lifestyle. Chief Scallywag Duncan treated the LME to toasted cheese sandwiches and tea and regaled us with a long ramble through his life and times.

This is the saga of how Duncan Stewart from Chester, only child of acrimoniously divorced parents, became Duncan Disorderly, who discovered the power and joy of music and decided to use this to bring people together and make them feel good.

‘I’m definitely good at organising things and I usually end up falling into the natural leader role which can be a funny place to be sometimes.

‘I think that comes from being around my parents who were very money and business orientated. But I have opposite values to them because I saw the way they ended up dealing with it all.

‘I spent a lot of time in the car listening to my parents talking about setting up their business, or waiting outside when they were doing business. They set up a big national office cleaning franchise in 1993.

‘A lot of my days were spent like that for a long time. That would have been from when I was five to when I went to boarding school when I was about 11. That gave me a lot of time to become independent and gave me the opportunity to make decisions for myself because my parents were preoccupied trying to do something.

It’s a funny one because these things

in the past kind of haunt you but they also make you who you are.

They give you a character and give you a chance to do stuff.

‘I spent three-and-a-bit years as a boarder at Shrewsbury School. It was a really posh, horrible place that one.

I got kicked out for smoking weed but that was just their excuse to get me out as I was going to fail my exams. From that point onwards, I had a totally anti-establishment attitude.

‘I remember I had this moment when I was being driven back from boarding school. I was in a bit of a funny place because I didn’t like being at boarding school, and I wasn’t really happy at home either.

So I was in-between two horrible places and this song just came into my head. I didn’t actually write it down but in my head I fluidly came up with the melody and the lines and the ideas of what chords it would be.

It was all in there.

‘Then my parents went through a really, really stressful divorce in 2002 when I was about 16 and, as a result, I moved out of home and rented a little house with a couple of friends.

‘My best way of dealing with it was to live on my own leaving them to sort out their stuff and be immature and do what they want. I decided to go and find life.

‘To this very day I am still dealing with it. I think the problem is because I am an only child there is a triangle, and I’ve got kind of the centre point and they’ve got their arguments, and I’m trying to not to hear. They are both always convinced that the other one is telling me really bad things about them. So I can’t have an opinion, you know?

‘Although it has been painful and stressful it has turned out to be a good thing because it has

given me the energy to put a positive message back into the world.

That’s my way of balancing out the way that I feel.

‘To be honest, if you listen to the lyrics of most of my songs, they are about finding that positivity within yourself. They are about how much our thoughts are our life and how, by looking after your thoughts, you are a looking after yourself. It’s difficult to do but if you think positively then you live in a positive way.

‘One of the first songs that I ever wrote was “Beautiful Day” which I wrote in that very first house in Chester. I’ve played it in every band I’ve been in since. Another one that is important to me is ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’.

SCALLYWAGS: THE JOURNEY This period when I first got really interested in music coincided with smoking weed. All of a sudden I noticed that music sounded a bit different. Just before I was 17, I decided to start playing the electric guitar and formed my first band playing covers in my bedroom. After that I concentrated on developing my song writing and playing original stuff.

‘The second band came out of my time doing a music course at Mid Cheshire College in Northwich. It was called Laffin’ from the Northern way of saying laughing, like “havin a laff”. ‘That band was great fun and lasted maybe three years. There were between four and six of us and a lot of it revolved around smoking weed. We were playing skapunk and trying to say things that ‘I got inspired quite heavily by a band you’re not allowed to say like “Fuck off. from Chester called the Wayriders.

Fuck off”. In 2005, we recorded a One day they were driving out of town nine-track album in two days at the to go on tour and they saw me and legendary Sawmills Studio in Cornwall my mate and asked us if we would like and released it on our own Good Times to come on tour with them and sell label. We sold 1,000 of them at gigs and their merchandise. So we jumped in at our own “Laff-Fest”, which we ran for the back of the van and went on tour two years in my friend’s barn in his with them. It was incredible. The tour garden in Chester. lasted 10 days with gigs every night.

They really showed us the way and I Late in 2006 my parents gave me the thought I could do that. So I went opportunity to get into the business from just playing with my friends to and I started running an office wanting cleaning franchise which I did for to actually go out and play this two years. I was making about £2500 music to people and live the life of a month but it wasn’t what I wanted travelling around.’ to do. The more money I earned, the more money I spent. It just wasn’t ‘Around that time, I made several trips to the life for me. the Caribbean to meet my dad who was a hobby sailor at that time. That’s where I During the summer of those two years, I started to hear off-beat rhythms which went to my first music festivals. What I really stuck with me. I really enjoyed the love about festivals is that everyone lets way you can dance to the reggae. So that go of their inhibitions. It’s like you’re not developed my music into a more skain England anymore. You’re in a place punk thing. where people feel free to just be. I really like that because I’m not a big fan of the ‘When I got back, I put together general feeling of oppression in England. my first proper gigging band called I realized after going to Leeds festival in RTLS, which stands for “Roll it, Toke it, 2006 and the Big Chill in 2007 that you Light it, Smoke it” (laughing). We did could get a volunteering job with Oxfam, our first ever gig two weeks after my and you could get in to festivals for free.

18th birthday at Hannah’s Bar in So in 2008, from May to September I Liverpool. That band lasted for about travelled around festivals. seven months.

I managed to sneak my way into Glastonbury with another band and I

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was stumbling around the site and wandered into the Small World tent. I was just blown away by it – a small marquee holding some 300 people with a little café and an acoustic vibe. This changed my life and I decided this was what I’m going to do.

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I had saved up some money and decided to move to Brighton where I signed up for a song-writing course at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music (BIMM) in September 2008.

Bizarrely it was the only time in my life when I didn’t write any songs.

‘I’ve learnt a lot about recording techniques and song-writing just by doing it. You could say I have a natural aptitude for it. Music is very mathematical and I’ve got a very mathematical mind. For me, the writing, recording and playing of music is a mathematical procedure.

It’s all to do with frequencies. It’s all got to fit together, make sense and come to a good logical conclusion It’s like you’re piecing together bits of a puzzle to try and make a whole thing.

During my time at BIMM, I met some incredible musicians and we set up a band called “Chukin” a name that comes from the sound the guitar makes in reggae when skankin. ‘I was playing with some of the best musicians I am probably ever going to jam with who are now all doing incredible things: William Lawrence is playing with Cirque du Soleil, touring the world as their guitarist; Sebastian Levarde is at the Berkley College of Music in Valencia in Spain; and sax player Elma Houghton is a professional musician in Barcelona.

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That summer 2009 I got a call from my friend who said his band Keltrix needed a guitarist for the summer because their guitarist had left and they had lots of festivals already booked.

So I joined and they were my way into the festival scene.

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The next year, as a result of the experience and contacts I had made, I managed to get Chukin into a whole summer of festivals including Small World and many other stages.

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‘After Chukin split up I set up a little band together with my girlfriend Elma who played sax and we did about 30 gigs in Brighton over four months. Then over that summer the band expanded to about 20 musicians who came and went.

We did 16 gigs in one weekend over four days at Secret Garden Party by just going up to the stages and blagging them to let us on Then at the end of that summer we Scallywags went on a busking mission without any plan. We drove over to France, and spent two months travelling through Paris and down south, stopping off in villages en route. Then we got into Spain and travelled around together in the van for six weeks.

I stayed on and lived in Granada for six months, renting a little room and setting up a recording studio in the basement. I met some other musicians who became the Spanish Scallywags.

After a while we drove back to England and the two Scallywag outfits met, jammed and spent the summer playing a rhumba heavy, Balkan/Gypsy, Reggae mix. That’s where the sound of the Scallywags came from. CF www.facebook.com/scallywaggin www.goodtimesmusic.co.uk

THE STINGER

MusicalSpaces

CON CLUB RIDES AGAIN Lewes Constitutional Club has been a membership club since the 1920s, has been through many phases and changes over the years and is now one of Lewes’ best music venues, with a grand stage, in-house PA, and a more than 200-person capacity. Anyone can apply for membership (runs from June to June, year on year) which gives you a discount at the bar and to many of the events, which now include a regular Comedy Club, dance classes and many other activities. The main music room is also available for hire for private parties. Non-members are welcome at all times.

It’s interesting to look back to late

2006/early 2007 when the club was on its uppers and the determined drinkers of the Lewes Arms were boycotting the pub over Greene King’s decision not to serve Harvey’s. Most of the drinkers decamped to the Club and it was from here that regular boycott meetings were held. Significantly, Steve Williams initiated and co-organised a major benefit concert to raise funds for the protest and musicians from all parts of Lewes’ musical spectrum turned up. It was huge success and led in due course to the Club being turned into a proper musical venue. Eventually two snooker tables were removed and the music room expanded and, since June 2008,

e are delighted to report that in 2014 Hastings acquired its own local music paper The Stinger, a bi-monthly mini-tabloid (current print run 10,000) which owes its existence mainly to the efforts of Andy Gunton. Andy came over to Lewes to sink a few pints at The Lamb and chinwag about our respective papers. He was good enough to ask us to write a profile of the LME for his paper and we’re happy now to return the favour. We both hope we can work together to link up musical scenes in the South.

Andy was a train driver then a manager of train drivers before accepting early retirement. He was formerly from Tonbridge and had been a drummer in various bands from the late ‘70s to 1987. He moved to Hastings the following year.

His first main contact with the local scene was through ‘Hastings Rocks’ – a local radio station that began in 1993 and broadcasts every year for 28 days in May. Andy got involved and became Chairman of the station from December 2005 to July 2013. He has also been a DJ on the station since 2002, hosting a dedicated local music show. He also writes a monthly local music news column for the ‘Hastings Observer’.

In 2011, he and actor/musician Richard Lock joined forces to launch a blog site called Pierless Music to encourage young musicians and the local music scene in general and through that got involved with the guys who run the ‘Fat Tuesday’ Festival – Hastings’ annual Mardi Gras which, over the years, has grown into an ambitious and exciting fiveday music festival which, in 2015, will be staged in February.

According to their website: ‘Hastings boasts a local music scene that is more vibrant than in many British cities, and a close rival to Brighton’s, as well as having been named the most musically sophisticated town or city in the UK.’ The Stinger was a natural development of all these activities and has been well received by readers and advertisers alike. So it should be. It’s well-written, nicely designed and produced and contains a range of interesting stories about the latest music scene and of course the town’s past history, centred round Hastings Pier which has always been a legendary rock venue. For example, Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols both played there – but obviously not on the same bill.

Following the October 2010 fire, Andy compiled and co-produced a 15track CD of original local music called “Not The End Of The Pier”, in aid of the restoration effort.

Happily now undergoing a £14m restoration the pier is hoped to be reopened Summer 2015.CF

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when The Elevators performed the first gig on the new stage, there have been regular gigs on Friday and Saturday nights virtually ever since. Sunday afternoon acoustic sessions have also proved very popular.

As well as being a welcome home for many local musicians – including local favourites like The Contenders, The Moonshine Band and The Kondoms – the Club has played host to some legends like Hank Wangford, Brian James of the Damned, The Dirty Strangers with beat poet John Sinclair, the return of Thunderclap Newman, Bex Marshall and local legends Arthur Brown and Mark Chadwick. Union Music have adopted it as one of their regular venues. Further amendments to the music room will mean greater access and better visibility at gigs in the future.

Amongst the many coming attractions are the return of The Kast Off Kinks and the Annual Open Weekend Beer Festival at the end of November. With a diverse range of musical styles represented, the Con Club in 2015 looks set to maintain its status as one of Lewes’ great venues.

On what is nearly the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s legendary gig at Lewes Town Hall on 19th January 1968, the Con Club will play host to Just Floyd who bill themselves as ‘The Most Authentic Live Pink Floyd Tribute Band’. Set your controls for the heart of the sun on Saturday, 24th Jan 2015. CF www.lewesconclub.com

www.pierlessmusic.co.uk www.thestinger.org.uk www.hastingsfattuesday.co.uk

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www.benjaminguitars.co.uk

Continued from p2 blanks and has uncovered other local ‘60s Lewes bands that we were previously unaware of. This info will appear in a future issue. Your feedback on this first attempt to being together a picture of the 1970s scene will be equally valuable.

The period in question was, of course, a vibrant musical time in general. There was a great British blues and rock boom and bands like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and of course Jimi Hendrix inspired many young musicians to pick up instruments and try and get a band together. Many of the great bands – including Hendrix – played live at Sussex

LLOYD GEORGE KNEW MY FATHER [ALSO SOMETIMES BILLED AS LLOYD GEORGE KNOWS MY FATHER] 1966-1967 Left to Right: Paul Robinson (guitar), Stuart Bradbury (bass), Robert Timlin (drums), Graham “Charlie” Frost (guitar), Chris Frost (vocals)

University and Brighton Dome just down the road.

Locally a big change that affected most of the musicians listed here was the creation of Priory School, a new comprehensive school which amalgamated the pupils from Lewes County Grammar School for Girls, Lewes County Grammar School for Boys and the Lewes Secondary Modern School in one institution. It was open not only to children in Lewes but also to those from the surrounding areas who had passed their 11-Plus.

As a result boys and girls from many different scenes and backgrounds came together under one roof. Hair got longer,

All the members of this band went to Lewes Grammar School. According to their gig list and other sources they played 26 gigs between 24th August 1966 and September 29th 1967 after which they broke up.

Lewes gigs were held at St Mary’s Social Centre, The Scout & Guide Hall, the Rugby Club, the Southdown Tennis Club, the Foresters Hall. Additional gigs at Uckfield, Buxted, Newick, Crowborough, Portslade, Eastbourne, Laughton and Battle.

A Sussex Express clipping confirms that the band played Lewes Town Hall on the 21st January 1967 in a gig promoted

by Borough Bonfire Society. The gig featured Robb Storme and The Whispers with Brighton band The Motion and Lloyd George in support. The Robb Storme Group, as they were then called, came back for another gig at Lewes Town Hall on April 15th 1967. [See LME 3]

substances abounded and a genuine music scene took shape.

There were many hip venues in Brighton where some of these Lewes bands played but there were not many places to play in Lewes. The Lamb, as now, put on bands regularly. There were small village halls scattered around which had Saturday night dances. Some local bands played the Town Hall, supporting bigger bands or entertaining bonfire society events.

This paucity of places to play led one musician Roger Lacey to establish a regular club at St Mary’s Social Centre on the edge of the Neville Estate. Christie’s, as it was called, started in 1970 and lasted

The two Frost brothers in the band had an elder brother Adrian who sang regularly at the Lewes Folk Club, then held at the Lewes Arms.

They had one guitar at home and all taught each other how to play. Chris Frost went off to teacher’s training while Graham formed and played in a number of other bands in Lewes over the years.

A Sussex Express clipping [10th March 1967] reports that Mick Whippy became the stand-in drummer for some of these gigs as Bob Timlin had developed glandular fever. Mick was John Whippy’s cousin and the youngest son of the Whippy family who ran the Brewer’s Arms Hotel.

LGKMF rehearsing in Lewes Scout & Guide Hall, January1967. Photo courtsey Bob Timlin

TEMPLE

[FORMERLY SATANIC TEMPLE] 1967-1978 From left: André Wicks (Bass Guitar/Vocals), Paul Stonehouse (Drums/Vocals), Philip Light (Lead guitar/vocals), Kevin Purdie (Lead Vocals)

The musicians who became Satanic Temple all lived in Malling and were members of the Riverside Youth Club, where they played their first live gigs in 1967. They were named by their original rhythm guitarist Malcolm James and featured first Tony Wiseman and then Tim Reed on drums.

Their first paid gig was at The Lamb for which they got £8. They were playing a lot of fairly heavy rock covers like ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath and stuff by Uriah Heep and Deep Purple. Later they dropped the Satanic from their name, brought in Paul Stonehouse on drums, and balanced out their sets with a greater variety of pop and rock material.

As the band grew in popularity in the East Sussex area they started promoting their own gigs at many local village halls and Brighton venues, including The King & Queen, The Hungry Years and The Richmond.

In 1974, following an audition in London, the band signed its first contract with the Grand Attractions Agency to do a three-month tour (July –September) of American bases in West Germany. Based in a hotel in Hanau near Frankfurt, the band got a salary as well as board and breakfast for playing up to six 45-minute sets a night. They returned for a further tour in December.

Following this, they expanded their range, touring regularly in the West Country and up north, although this was not necessarily financially beneficial. They also toured a lot of British forces bases in the UK which proved a ready market and later toured Holland, where their version of ‘Radar Love’ always brought the house down.

The band first started recording in 1975 at a local studio owned by a friend, and then later at Pebble Beach Sound Recorders in Worthing, which was owned by Adam Sieff, of the Marks & Spencer dynasty.

They later recorded some selfpenned songs at TMC (Tooting Music Centre) and Vineyard Studios in South London, which included one single, backed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and other tracks which made

it to acetate but were never released.

The band split in 1978 since when Phil Light has continued to this day to play solo gigs. For a period, André and Kevin formed a duo called ‘Double Vision.’

A number of the Temple recordings can now be found on the web: ‘The Story So Far’ – acetate recorded 1972-1973 www.britishmusicarchive.com/ component/muscol/T/256-temple

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From left: André Wicks, Paul Stonehouse, Philip Light, Kevin Purdie

until the end of the following year, providing a welcome home for many of the bands featured here.

Few of these bands achieved wider recognition or even lasted very long but a surprising number of individual musicians from this time went on to successful careers in the music business.

The LME would like to thank all the musicians and others who have given their time and effort to make this history possible. Space has only allowed us to run a small fraction of the information we have gathered but we hope that a broader publication bringing together Lewes’ musical history over a longer period may be possible at some stage in the future.

Roger Lacey Roger Lacey was a singer, song-writer and guitarist in several bands. His father edited the Sussex Express for which Roger wrote record reviews under the pen name Pat Caley.

He later worked for the Brighton & Hove Gazette and the Evening Argus. He has recently retired as deputy sports editor on the Mail on Sunday.

Hieronymous Bosch played hard, bluesy rock, very much in the Eric Clapton /John Mayall mould with a couple of early Free numbers thrown in. For some reason which I can't recall, John left Bosch and Simon and Robin started playing with an organist from Telscombe called Hugh Bedford. Hugh was something of a prodigy – very impressive with a Keith Emerson-type approach to music, mixing classical with rock and throwing in odd time signatures here and there. At around the same time my band with Graham and Dave broke up so I teamed up with the others and we formed Nan Kemp.

‘It was 1971. I was 21, Simon and Roger were 19 and Hugh was 17.We started writing what we thought was quite experimental music, influenced by the likes of Gentle Giant and Soft Machine. We enjoyed it but it was probably a bit self-indulgent and not really suited to playing at gigs where the kids just wanted to dance.

‘I remember one incident when we played at a youth centre in Hove (I think it was the Court Hope Centre).

We were halfway through our third epic piece when some poor soul shouted: "Play something we can understand". We laughed about it at the time but maybe we should have listened to his plea!

‘Our best gigs were in a concert setting and we played a string of them at some of the country's top public schools. I think we got the gigs through Isaac "Ike" Nossel who had a holiday job

Elvis Costello & The Attractions. Left to right: Steve Nieve, Pete Thomas, Bruce Thomas, Elvis Costello Roger Lacey performing with Nan Kemp at Christies 1970. Photo: Flo Flowers.

Insets: (left) Nan Kemp Christie’s poster 1971. (Below) Hieronymous Bosch.

From left: Robin Steadman, John Whippy, Simon Blyth.

PETE THOMAS at the Brighton & Hove Gazette when I was working there.

Ike was a sharp Jewish kid from Hove who had the connections to get us gigs at, among other places, Lancing College, Hurstpierpoint College, and Downside, the country's top Catholic public school at Shepton Mallet in Somerset. These were all "sit-down" concerts and allowed us to show off a bit with our 15-minute epics. At the Lancing gig we supported a band called Flash, formed by Pete Banks, the original guitarist with Yes. It was a particularly weird gig in that they had a party of Roedean girls there as "guests" but, for the duration of the concert, the boys sat downstairs and the girls upstairs in the gallery. It was only afterwards that they were allowed to mingle!

‘Ike later went on to become a top studio engineer and producer, working at Abbey Road with Paul McCartney and Jack Bruce amongst others and running his own Parkgate studio in Sussex.

‘I think Nan Kemp started falling apart after we had a disastrous performance in the Melody Maker's annual rock contest when we played in an area heat at the Black Lion pub at Patcham. It all ended a bit messily!

Eventually Hugh left and Simon, Robin and I teamed up with John Whippy.

‘We had a few name changes before settling on Beezer and by then we were playing a curious mixture of covers and originals. I think most of our gigs were in Brighton, where we played The Hungry Years a few times and did a benefit concert for the Brighton Arts Lab with Mad Hatter at the Union Hall in Air Street. Our highest profile gig was as one of the support bands for a concert by Country Joe McDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish and Woodstock fame, at Hove Town Hall, on October 15th 1974.

A few months after that Beezer broke up. I'd been the main songwriter, although in their final form the songs were very much band efforts. By then my ideas had dried up and we maybe all felt we needed a change.’

Born in Sheffield [9th August 1954], Pete Thomas’ family moved to Seaford in 1965. Now based in Los Angeles, he has become a world-famous drummer mainly due to his work with Elvis Costello & The Attractions. He was happy to share his Lewes teenage musical memories with LME. He said: “As soon as I start thinking about it, it’s like Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah. It’s funny how all these bits and pieces come back. We can definitely get a humorous article out of this.”

HIERONYMOUS BOSCH 1968-1970 John Whippy (guitar) Robin Steadman (drums) Simon Blyth (bass) LONG GREY MARE 1968-1970 Roger Lacey (guitar/vocals) Dave Langridge (guitar/vocals) Mick Whippy (drums) Graham Frost (bass) NAN KEMP 1970-1972 Roger Lacey (guitar/vocals) Robin Steadman (drums) Hugh Bedford (keyboards) Simon Blyth (bass)

Pete Davies

CORN IN EGYPT/ STRANGEWATER Roger Lacey (guitar/vocals) Robin Steadman (drums) Simon Blyth (bass)

THE GROBS

BEEZER 1973-1974 Roger Lacey (guitar/vocals) Robin Steadman (drums) John Whippy (lead guitar) Simon Blyth (bass)

Graham “Charlie” Frost

‘I got a drum and a cymbal and a copy of ‘With The Beatles’ when I was nine. So that was it. I was hooked from then on.

When I was 10, I played with a couple of blokes from school but it wasn’t really a band. We could only play one song.

‘I went to Lewes Old Grammar and then transferred to Lewes Priory in 1969 which was great from a rock ‘n’ roll point of view but academically it completely screwed everybody up because suddenly there were girls, and people at the gates selling drugs and the whole thing went off the dial.

‘The first group that I got in was based in Seaford and they were called The Lilac Domino. They were all from the partially-sighted school and they all had these lilac satin shirts and glasses like Coca Cola bottles. It was a bit strange really but they were sweet and my parents helped and I think we did one gig at The Plough in Seaford.

Pete Thomas, foreground, with band at Radio Brighton.

Photo courtesy Graham Frost

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‘Then I got friendly with Pete Davies at school and we used to go round to his house to listen to The Who and jump up and down on his bed with guitars. I’m a bit vague and just can’t remember exactly how we started out but Pete and I hooked up with Paul Skinner as the bass player. We were called The Grobs.

‘I think Pete or his girlfriend found that name which is a fairly dodgy name but we thought it was sort of genius at the time. I think it means a clownish person.’ [The OED defines the word grobian as a clownish, slovenly person.

Grobb is a German word that means rough, uncouth and rude] ‘I was trying to remember what we played which was mainly covers – easy Cream songs, ‘Purple Haze’, ‘My Generation’, a couple of T Rex tracks – plus a couple of originals.

‘We rehearsed up at Christie’s a few times and actually played there I think two or three times. I remember one gig we did up there, which was quite a big deal for us, was supporting the band Long Grey Mare, with Graham Frost and Roger Lacey. They seemed sort of geriatric to us but they were probably only 19 or something.

MITCH MITCHELL ‘When I started thinking about those years there were quite a few influential moments and memorable events.

‘For instance, I discovered that Mitch Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix’s drummer, had a house near Heathfield, so I used to hitchhike out there and just stand outside. Then one day his roadie came down to the gate. His name was Nunu, he was really nice and he said do you want to come in and see Mitch’s drums.

So he took me in and showed me all the drums and then he said do you want to come and meet Mitch. So we went over Paul Skinner

Continued on p18

Ewords + imagesLEmichael munday

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www.michaelmunday.com & www.michaelmunday2.com

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Continued from p15 to the big house and Mitch made me my first ever vodka and orange with real orange juice and there was some gorgeous bird there and he played me some records by the jazz drummer Elvin Jones and the whole thing to me it was like ‘Wow this is It!’ ‘He also gave me a bit of a talking to.

He said if you’re a drummer, you’re only ever as good as the people you play with, so just try and play with the best people you can. If you think someone is a great guitarist then aim yourself at them, which is good advice.

‘Through that I was introduced to a band called Daddy Long Legs, who were a bunch of Americans dodging the draft for Vietnam who had a farmhouse in the same area [probably Oakdown Farm nr.

Burwash] and I went there two or three times and got drunk with them. They were really friendly. Broad Oak Village Hall nearby was where we used to go and see them play and Mitch Mitchell used to sit in with them. I remember one time Pete Davies and I were there and when Mitch showed up he said to me: ‘Your prince is here.’ You just remember little bits like that.

GIGS ‘Another venue at the time was The Big Apple in Brighton. We all went there to see bands like Johnny Winter and Deep Purple with lead guitarist Richie Blackmore. The first thing that happened when they played was that he had these real stack-heeled boots and the heel came off one of them so he had to do the whole show sort of limping around the stage. Then he had a white Strat and he smashed it up and threw it in the audience and we all got it and took it back to Pete Davies’ house. The next day we all went round to inspect it and it was a Vox copy which was a disappointment.

‘On another occasion we all went to Sussex University to see The Who. The gig was held in the refectory and they’d made the stage out of the dining tables.

We were all standing there at the front when Pete Townshend leapt up in the air wearing his white boiler suit, came down on the tables and they all came apart and he went right through and completely disappeared and then had to climb out.

That was an influential moment.

DRUMMING ‘I bought my kit one drum at a time. It was a real mishmash. There used to be a shop in The Laines in Brighton where I remember getting a Premier snare drum. I would also look at ads in the papers. I had a bass drum from the ‘30s which I painted purple. I remember we did a gig at The Brewer’s Arms in Lewes in 1970/71 which was the one and only time I had two bass drums. They weren’t the same size but I tried it out as everyone then was getting into two bass drums like Ginger Baker.

‘Music at school was not encouraged at all. I used to go to the Salvation Army Music School in Watergate Lane and there was a guy there called Frank Hollingbury who used to do the drums. I used to go on Friday and he was really strict and he told me I would never make it as a professional drummer which I still haven’t forgotten.’

Was your Dad quite proud of your musical activities?

‘Not at the time he wasn’t. Far from it.‘

MISBEHAVING ‘A lot of the scene in Lewes at that time was around that pub The Rainbow [now The Rights of Man]. I don’t know why we were in there.

Perhaps it was like a coffee bar as well.

Anyway they let us in and it seemed as if all their jukebox ever played was ‘School’s Out’ by Alice Cooper. Then we used to get Pete’s brandy from the off-licence next door and sit in the grounds of Lewes Castle and get completely hammered.

‘I remember me and Keith [now Tom] Morley coming down for breakfast tripping. Keith was just pushing his egg around the plate and I can remember how bewildered my Mum looked. My Dad took to locking me out for a while. We were all doing bottles of cough mixture, breaking open nose inhalers, drinking all this peach brandy. Then there were people selling hash and acid.

‘There was these two hippies called Coddie and Andy who had a caravan in Southease and instead of going to school you would go to Coddy and Andy’s and there were various girls who also didn’t go to school. So that became an alternative. Later Coddy jumped off a bridge and committed suicide. It all got a bit odd.’

Tom Morley By his own account, Keith Morley came from a poor family in Saltdean. He was the youngest of four children and his mum died when he was 13. He passed the 11-Plus, went to Lewes Grammar then Priory before graduating to Leeds College of Art and Design where he met Green Gartside, who had decided to form a band after seeing the Sex Pistols. In 1977, together with Nial Jinks, the three of them moved to a squat in Camden and formed Scritti Politti, a Marxist-inspired band whose lo-fi funk reggae music was admired by John Peel and led to them being signed to Rough Trade in 1979. Keith took the name Tom Soviet. When the band supported the Gang

THE PETER GREEN RIOT ‘One of the high points for The Grobs and probably the most pivotal thing that happened as far as we were concerned was a concert by Peter Green at Priory School in 1971. I think it was that date because, by that time, I’d became completely worthless academically. See Editorial (p31).

MUSICAL ADVENTURES I left school when I was 16 and got a job on Newhaven Harbour in the transport office. They used to have all the fruit boats there and I got a job overseeing loading the lorries for Covent Garden. So I started earning some money and I worked there for about a year and a half and saved up and bought a proper drum kit and then I answered an ad in the Melody Maker, went up to London and got in this first band called Ocean where I met Paul Riley, the band’s bass player.

He got into Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers [pub rock band/1971-75] and he got me into that band in 1972.

I was with them for 2 ½ years and did one album called ‘Bongos Over Balham’. I remember coming back to Brighton to play at the Hungry Years and the King & Queen. That for me, at the time, was pretty hot shit, coming back to the area in a proper band.

‘Elvis Costello used to come and see the band in London. Jake Riviera, who managed us later co-founded Stiff Records with Dave Robinson and managed Elvis. I went to America for a couple of years and Jake got me back to play in The Attractions.

‘I got lucky. You look back on it and you think God how did that happen because there’s not many people like Elvis Costello, who started in 1977 and are still going. There’s probably not anyone who works as consistently as him. He probably is what you would call a genius’.

Of Four in Brighton in 1980, Gartside suffered a severe panic attack, was hospitalised and didn’t return to the stage for 26 years though he remains a very successful songwriter. Tom left the band in November 1981 and renamed himself Tom Morley. He now describes himself as a Vibe Navigator and conducts transformational workshops and events, many involving mass drumming. See: www.tommorley.com ‘Pete Thomas and I cruised through Lewes Grammar in the B-stream which was kind of cool. Pete was very much the joker of the class but if the teacher asked an intelligent question, Pete would have an intelligent answer. He always did his homework. His dad was a doctor and he just grew up in a house where you got things done.

‘Pete Davies was the sort of musician in the school. He spent a lot of time playing the guitar and was a really cool guy who was good looking and dressed well and everyone thought he was the one who was going to make it. When they formed The Grobs, Pete Thomas was really up for the idea of me being a singer with the band because I looked the way I did and I could dance and always got people going at parties and he thought I’d be a good stage presence. I did get to the rehearsal but Pete Davies didn’t want me to be the singer as it would have taken too much attention from him.

‘Me and my brother Bobbi used to do the Pharos liquid light show at

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Scritti Politti, second from left: Tom Morley

Christie’s on a regular basis. I was 15 and he was three years older. He had an old black London cab we used to use.

We made a huge difference to the atmosphere and I think we got paid £5 which we thought was an amazing amount for having so much fun.

‘Another guy at school was Phil Langran who taught me the guitar and afterwards said: ‘There you go. I’ve finished off your image for you’ because I looked like a musician but I couldn’t play anything. I’ve been grateful to him my whole life for that. Phil was one of the most intelligent guys but he was quite humble with it. He had a wicked sense of humour and he was a bit geeky. We used to play together and pretend we were Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel because he was very tall and I wasn’t.’

Phil recalls: ‘Keith was a Hendrix fan and had an enormous thatch of strawberry blonde hair. He used to play a guitar with a harmonica and kazoo around his neck and used a bass drum and a hi-hat pedal. It was like playing with a small very hairy one-man band. I can remember some hilarious times is the polite way to put it. The sheer novelty of it.’

‘The drum became an important thing for me because we used to sit around getting stoned at parties and of course there’d be the inevitable bongos that someone had brought back from Morocco and, whenever it got kind of musical, I’d play them and people would say you’ve got a sense of rhythm. If you’re a drummer and you’re playing a beat and people are dancing, you know it’s working; if they’re not dancing, you know it’s not working. You get immediate feedback. I like that aspect of being an artist, having a direct line to the audience.

‘We decided to form Scritti for political motives really. I want the world to be a better place. It’s run pretty much by people with a kind of insect mentality of short-term survival. In my musical ventures I’ve never been a musician for the sake of being a musician. Now I’m supporting quite a lot of peace ventures and I think really I’m a community builder.

Born 18 May 1954, Eric Goulden lived in Newhaven and went to Lewes Grammar/Priory after he passed the 11-Plus. He did not respond to our interview request and it was only when I consulted his highly readable autobiography entitled ‘A Dysfunctional Success’ that I understood why – he hated Lewes and hated school. He was short, had to wear horn-rimmed glasses, got bullied and almost expelled and couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Schoolmate Phil Langran told the LME: “Eric Goulden was one of the more original of a bunch of very original people.

He had this idea that jazz, which was deeply unfashionable at the time, was the music to play.” Eric refers to his failed attempt to get a group together with two others, one of which sounds like Phil [‘the other boy grew up and started playing in folk clubs’] and then recounts his first jazz experience: ‘I got a full-size Eko acoustic guitar and electrified it by sticking the earpiece from a pair of army surplus headphones to the body. I plugged it into a homemade tenwatt amplifier given to me by a local TV repair man that I met at a jazz club. All the heavy–duty musicians were into

Phil Langran, upstairs at the Lewes Arms, February 1977. Photo: Flo Flowers.

PHIL LANGRAN Born in Essex, Phil grew up in

wreckless Eric

This famous Stiff Records promo pic features (from left): Ian Dury, Wreckles Eric, Elvis Costello, Mick Lowe and Larry Wallis

Newhaven from the age of eight and went to Lewes Grammar then Priory from 1966-72. He met his wife there: “When we went co-ed I think my studies might have suffered but my social life definitely improved.”

During the 1970s he formed several bands in Brighton and London made up largely of people from school in Lewes. In 1982, he moved up north and into the academic world, first to Leeds, then Hull, then Nottingham, where he has lived for the last 16 years. He currently plays with The Phil Langran Band – which includes Frank McCarthy, formerly of Lewes band Pilgrim – and named, he says, so that when things go tits up you know who to blame..

LEWES/Early ‘70s

‘Since I started to play music in my mid-teens, I realised that the most enjoyable part was making up my own stuff. I still do it.

‘I was one of the people who ran the Folk & Blues club at Priory. We had John and Bob Copper from the Copper Family come and sing a couple of times in the early ‘70s, also people from the folk club scene in Brighton and lots of people from Priory including Keith (now Tom) Morley, Denis Reeve-Baker, Steve Skull, (all in the same year-group). Also in our year-group were Steve Wood (now Warbeck), Andrew Ranken, Pete Davies, Paul Skinner and Eric Goulden.

‘We used to invade the traditional folk club at the Elephant & Castle in Lewes in a very rude way. We’d make a big entrance, disturb everyone, listen to the people that we were with and then go away. One person reacted to this with the famous comment: ‘If that’s folk music, my prick’s a bloater.’”

‘Christie’s was really popular and generally full of a mass of small hairy

jazz…so I went to a local jazz club at a club in Peacehaven called the Gay Highlander….I went home confused – my head ringing with trumpets, trombones, clarinets and banjos.

It was a hideous racket but I persevered. A guitar player didn’t show up one night so they gave me some chord sheets and sat me at the back where I played chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk all night, with a chord change at the beginning of every bar. Soon I was playing trad jazz at the Pier Hotel opposite the Palace Pier in Brighton…it was full of low-life beatnik scum…was refurbished in the late ‘70s and renamed the Buccaneer. Then it turned into the Escape Club.’

His website bio reads:‘In his thirty-seven year career Wreckless Eric has made seventeen albums and worked with, or had his songs covered by artists as diverse as The Proclaimers, Yo La Tengo, The Blockheads (with and without Ian Dury), The Lightning Seeds, Holly Golightly, Cliff Richard, The Monkees, Ian Hunter.. to name a few. In 2012, the painter Peter Blake named Wreckless Eric as one of the most important pop icons of the past forty years, and included him on the remake of The Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s cover where he takes his place between David Hockney and Grayson Perry. On his last ever radio show, recorded a week before he died, Lou Reed played Eric’s ‘Take The Cash’ and described him as magnificent.’

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people. I remember Roger Lacey playing Tim Buckley songs from ‘Blue Afternoon’ on a 12-string. The Rainbow was the best pub if you were underage and there were bands on at The Lamb or Pete Foord’s disco. We used to go to concerts in Brighton at the Dome (Lindisfarne/Family) and gigs at Jimmy’s (Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum) and the Hungry Years.

THE MUSTANGS 1974

After school I went to live in Hove for a year and in 1974 formed a country rock band called The Mustangs with Ray Cooper (bass, later with the Amazorblades and the Oyster Band), Mark Sedgewick (guitarist, later with Holly & The Italians) and Charlie Hooker from Brighton Arts School, who was such a fierce drummer that, to the dismay of certain landlords, he used to nail his kit to the floor so it wouldn’t move into the audience.

I moved up to London, lasted a year, came back home, went back to London, lived in Brighton for a while, and generally kept playing and writing songs.

Below from left: Mark Sedgewick, Ray Cooper, Phil Langran, Charlie Hooker.

[Photographer unknown courtesy Phil Langran].

EphotosLEflo flowers

PANAMA 1976-78

Dave Finch (vocals), Pete Foord (keyboards), Mick Gibbs (guitar), Simon Blyth (bass), Chris “Tigger” Priestley/ Chris Sharp (drums), Jim Morrison (fiddle)

We’d all been through Priory except for Chris who was from Brighton and Jim from Harrogate. We wanted to play country rock and Ry Cooder numbers and I tried to fit in as many of my songs as possible. We played at the Six Bells at Chiddingly, The Lamb, The Alhambra and The Farmers at Scayne’s Hill.

Why we called ourselves Panama is a mystery to me. I think it was just at that point where that slightly pretentious bollocks was about to be swept away by people who we knew – Elvis Costello’s drummer Pete Thomas and Eric, who’d come back from art college in Hull as Wreckless Eric. I always liked Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. I remember going to see the first Stiff Tour at the Brighton Top Rank.

[1977]. That was really exciting and a good shakeup of the scene.

Original 1976 Panama line-up: (Top) Dave Finch, (Below from left) Dave Finch, Mick Gibbs, Chris Sharp (in hat), Pete Foord, Phil Langran, Simon Blyth Photo courtesy Phil Langran

1978 Panama line-up: (From left) Chris “Tigger” Priestley (drums), Phil Langran (guitar/vocals), Mick Gibbs (guitar), Pete Foord (keyboards), Simon Blyth (bass).

DIP DAZZLE & THE INDICATORS 1978-79

Mick Gibbs (guitar), Simon Blyth (bass), Chris “Tigger” Priestley (drums), Denis Reeve-Baker (keyboards), Mike “Paz” Parris (vocals )

‘Some of us were wandering round, me included, who had this idea that we might somehow make it, an idea that I came to associate with the times. People were going to make it or they’d made it. Most of the people hadn’t made it. Most of them were going to make it.

‘So we decided to update Panama and get away from that West-Coast-ish image so we formed Dip Dazzle and The Indicators. I think my wife came up with the name. We played slightly faster and slightly louder. I think we might even have tried to look like we knew less chords than we really did.I think it was the last attempt I made to try and keep up with the times.

We shared gigs with bands like The Stickers [Steve Skull/Andrew Ranken (singer)].

“Phil Langran was a good front man with a dry sense of humour. He often used to start a gig by saying "We've suffered for our music, now it's your turn" – Simon Blyth

Photo courtesy Phil Langran Clockwise from top: Chris Priestley (Tigger), Simon Blyth, Mick Gibbs, Denis Reeve-Baker, Phil Langran, Mike Parris (Paz)

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BUSKING WITH RANKEN’S ROMEOS

Photo courtesy Phil Langran

‘I went up to London to do my degree in 1979 and stayed up there for three years with regular visits to Lewes, Brighton and Newhaven. Andrew Ranken had this idea called Ranken’s Romeos.

‘It was about the time that Covent Garden was being refurbished and it changed from a closed-up place with rotting vegetables to a huge open space with very expensive shops that sold you things you didn’t need.

‘There was a very good opportunity for a kind of licensed busking and there were all kinds of people that came through there. It was a very, very good way for a lot of people to stay in touch, have a laugh and earn enough money to go off and buy themselves a meal.

‘By the end of it there were twelve people in the band and we got a few interesting bookings from a guy associated with the British Film Institute for a couple of parties which were quite memorable occasions. By then we had Dave Iron coming up from Portsmouth and the Korner brothers (Joe and Simon) ‘I remember Andrew saying to us that he was going to join a band which was going to play traditional Irish music and IRA songs with his guy from the Nipple Erectors. We thought he was mad. We couldn’t quite fathom it at all. Rather like Wreckless, he did something that was completely fresh.’

Busking in Covent Garden. Vocalist Andrew Ranken (right).

saucepan lids. They’d absolutely had it, completely beyond redemption.

‘Joshua Bagmat lasted only until we left school in 1972 when we all went our separate ways. . Stephen went off to Bristol to do drama and French, Kim went off to medical school and Steve Skull went to work for Clothkits in Lewes.

THE POGUES

ANDREW RANKEN Do you look back on the Lewes period with some fondness?

‘Absolutely, yes. The Lewes music scene was very rich at the time. I do think it was quite special.’

Born in Ladbroke Grove [Nov 13th, 1952], Andrew spent a large part of his childhood in Heathfield and went to Lewes Grammar School in 1965, where he got into drumming almost by accident.

He told Carol Clerk, author of ‘Kiss My Ass: The Story of The Pogues’: “I had an older cousin who’d been trying to learn the guitar. He was so frustrated he gave the guitar to me and I didn’t realise for a long time that it was virtually unplayable. The action was so high it made your fingers bleed. I persevered for a few months and I found it impossible.

Somebody gave me a pair of bongos and I thought ‘Oh, God, this is much easier’.

Little did I realise....”

He told the LME: ‘When I went to Lewes Grammar, I arrived in the third year and met Stephen Warbeck and we became very good friends and started playing together. He had an acoustic guitar and I had a set of bongos. That was the start of it.

‘At that time Marc Bolan had Tyrannosaurus Rex, which was just guitar and bongos. We thought. if they can do it so can we. and it was great because we really couldn’t afford instruments anyway. We made up our own songs but gradually we thought our line-up was a bit limiting. Stephen was more of a piano player than a guitar player and we also wanted to form a proper band as we were both very into the blues by that time.

‘The band, which was called Joshua Bagmat, featured me as vocalist, Steve Skull on guitar, Kim Ryle on bass and Stephen on piano or electric keyboard and additional vocals. We are still good friends. Steve is an excellent guitarist and now lives in Cornwall where he has a good sea shanty group – Du Hag Owr (the Black and Gold). Kim gave up music and became a doctor and lives near Southampton. God knows

The original Pogues/Left to right: Andrew Ranken, James Fearnley, Jem Finer, Cait O’Riordan, Peter “Spider” Stacy and Shane McGowan.

where the name came from, probably getting stoned. It didn’t actually mean anything we just liked the sound of it.

‘We were doing our own blues-based stuff and did some rock cover versions as well. We did some gigs at the school, some at Christie’s, some at a place in Newhaven and a few private parties. We didn’t get that many gigs because most of our equipment was pretty terrible.

We didn’t have a proper PA system. We did find someone who was willing to drive us round a bit but they weren’t always available.

‘My kit was a pile of rubbish I bought off a kid at school for £40 and managed to patch up. In fact, Pete Thomas gave me a few bits and pieces, which was very kind of him. Pete was in a really good three piece called The Grobs who did quite a few gigs and I used to go and see them and picked up stuff from watching him. I also became good friends with another drummer called Patrick Freyne and I used to go round his place and we’d practice together. He was very good at an early age.

‘I could never afford any decent cymbals and, on the way to one of our few gigs, a terrible thing happened. Kim had borrowed his dad’s estate car and the back doors flew open when we were going down the dual carriageway from London to Brighton. All the cymbals fell out and there was a huge lorry behind us. We stopped and went back and picked them up and they were just completely flattened, just like a set of

Stephen Warbeck Stephen Warbeck, one of Andrew’s classmates at Lewes Grammar, has become one of the best-known film composers working in Britain today. His many credits include ‘Shakespeare in Love’ for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Score. He has also written extensively for theatre productions and has written scores for more than forty television plays or films, including all of Lynda La Plante’s series Prime Suspect dramas, for which he was nominated for a BAFTA award. Stephen plays with Andrew in hKippers and writes all the music for the band.

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‘I met Shane [MacGowan] and Jem [Finer] when we were rehoused out of a squat and into short-life housing on the Hillview Estate in King’s Cross. Shane was just a guy I knew from drinking in the local pub. We used to talk about Irish music all the time which I always loved. [Andrew was very fond of his Irish grandfather, picked up some songs from him and made various trips to Ireland when he was a boy] ‘When he and Jem got The Pogues together I didn’t even know about it.

Then I got this call out of the blue asking me to come for an audition which I did but I didn’t hear anything for more than a month by which time I was sure I hadn’t got the job. Then they called me up again to do a another audition, this time with a drum kit stripped down to the bare essentials consisting of only a snare drum and a floor tom-tom, which I had to stand up and play. I’d never done anything like that before and it was really hard at first but I got the hang of it. The band took off so quickly there was no time to even think about it. That was 1983.

‘At the start it was just such a laugh we didn’t really mind the relentless touring. For a few years, if we weren’t on the road we were in the studio recording. That is the thing that destroys so many bands and musicians.

I think we became a cropper as a result of that as well and actually needed a few years off. It got to the point where we said we needed a night off every three days. We were earning enough to have a proper tour bus, stay in decent hotels, stop sharing rooms with each other then it became a lot more comfortable and manageable.

‘Deborah died in 1991 when I’d been with The Pogues for almost eight years.

It was a massive upheaval because we’d had our first child just a week before. I continued with the band until 1996 when we took an enforced sabbatical having sacked Shane. We did two more albums but the fun had gone out of it really and the bollocks as well.

‘Then back in 2000/2001 we constantly had people saying we’d love you to get back together and do some more shows and eventually we agreed.

It didn’t go smoothly by any means – mind you it never did – but it went well enough for us to think it was worth carrying on. We’re still playing a bit – we’ve done five shows this year so far – but I don’t think anyone wants to get back on the road seriously as we’ve all branched out and done other things.’

Andrew plays regularly with Stephen Warbeck in a band called The hKippers (with a silent h) – who play ‘stupid world music’, mainly improvised a with a lot of humour. He also has a blues band called The Mysterious Wheels with Joe and Simon Korner. CF

EwordsLEjohn may

Left to right: Jez Bird, Doug Sanders, Paul Wincer, Mark Ellis.1980. Photo Adrian Boot.

THEModsmakegood LAMBRETTAS The Lambrettas are the most successful band to come out of Lewes to date and are now back in action, with two of the band’s original members and two new recruits. Doug Sanders [with additional input from his partner Amanda] shared their memories and photo albums with the LME to enable us to produce the most detailed article on the band’s history yet published.

A very young Doug Sanders in Oakenload t-shirt.

BEGINNINGS

‘I was born in 1955. I didn’t come from a musical family far from it. They didn’t have any association with it whatever and music round the house was not something I really remember. I always liked music and I started listening to weird stuff and blues from the age of 12 on my own volition. I wasn’t encouraged. I remember at night-time tuning into Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline and listening through those really old-fashioned earphones you used to get.

‘I think I was about 14 when I got an acoustic guitar but very quickly moved to an electric guitar just because they made more noise and they looked a lot more glamorous. I fancied myself as a bit of a pop star at that point. It’s all gone downhill since then! [Laughs] ‘When I very first started and I didn’t know anything about it at all, I was so unmusical I was playing riffs on one or two strings. I remember some guy coming to me and saying how many chords do you know and I said ‘Chords.

What are they?’ When he told me, I was shattered. I thought I was just getting the hang of it. I thought I’d mastered it.

‘A lot of the time I just used to sit down in my bedroom and play along to records like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Savoy Brown Blues Band and all that sort of stuff and try and learn how to play the solos. It must

have sounded terrible but you’ve got to start somewhere.

‘Once I started playing with a band, my parents were quite proud of me.

Sadly my dad died from a heart attack at the age of 50 when I was 20.

‘My dad was a pretty cool guy. He used to be friendly with Charlie Watts and used to drive him around. He had a horsey connection with Charlie’s wife Shirley who bred horses then and still does. When he was young my dad had been a jockey, then a show jumper and also a riding teacher. When I was a kid, I used to get taken to one of their houses, either the one by The Swan or the bigger place at the end of The Broyle at Halland. I knew he was a pretty big star and thought it weird that he was so very ordinary and was making a cup of tea for us. I’ve got a shirt which Charlie got from Mick Jagger and which, for some reason, he gave to my dad.’

‘When I started playing in rock bands, I was younger than most of the guys and I used to really envy them.

They were big stars for me. I thought being in a band was the absolute pinnacle. I was pretty hippyish at that time with long hair and jeans.

‘I managed to join some of those bands purely by luck because I think they just ran out of guitarists and they thought he’s better than nothing. I think it was good that I got thrown in at the deep end because it made me try

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just that much harder. I knew I wasn’t up to scratch with the rest of the guys playing. It was all very much about selfindulgent playing in those days especially amongst guitar players. I really had to try hard to keep up with them. I look back and laugh about it now but those guys helped me out.

OAKENLODE ‘The first serious band I was in was called Oakenlode and when I was 19 we went off on a tour of American bases in Germany. I’d never been abroad before.

We were based in Wiesbaden. We didn’t get paid much, just enough to eat and have a little bit of money. We often stayed in empty barracks on the bases where, for a dollar, you could eat pancakes and stuff for breakfast.

‘It was quite hard work because it was four 45-minute sets a night with 15 minute breaks in-between. I could never remember that amount of songs now. The army people were quite staid and at a lot of places, a country band would have been more suitable. It was the ‘70s so it was also quite segregated.

‘One black club we went to, we thought we’d do a couple of Sam & Dave numbers, and some Tamla Motown and soul songs but when we first started, we were getting some abuse like “You can’t play soul. You ain’t got no soul honkies”. But by the time we’d got to the third or fourth number, they decided that, although we were

“There was a vacuum at that time in the music business. You had the big bands, the punk thing had shot its bolt and there was this gap, and it was the Moddy, power-poppy type bands that filled it up.

We were just lucky really, because we just got The Lambrettas name to get people to our gigs in Brighton. I'm still a Mod at heart. I've still got the suits, the Harringtons, the DM shoes. In a way it spoils you for real life having so much success so young, but I wouldn't change it.”

Jez Bird – Quoted in obituary by Pierre Perrone, The Independent 31.10.08

white, we were okay because we were British not American. So that was cool and it turned into a really good night.’

Fellow band member Nick Patching recalls: ‘One of the stories I can tell you is we were so hungry one night we’d played a club called the ‘Top Hat’ in Mannheim and they put us up for the night in these troops quarters where they’d turned the heating up full blast so it was absolutely ridiculously hot. We were all starving but what Doug and I knew was that Ted Jarvis the keyboard player had a can of beans in his rucksack that I think his Mum gave him and he’d still got them. So Doug and I waited until everyone was asleep and we went and got the can of beans and heated it up on the radiators and that was the beginning of the end of Ted’s time in Oakenlode. He didn’t like it very much. In fact, he was furious. This was From left: Ted Jarvis like the currency (Keyboards), Nick Patching (guitar), Graham Frost of life. (bass/vocals), Doug Sanders (guitar), Bob Palmer (drums).

SHAKEDOWN ‘After Oakenlode came a band called Shakedown who were also playing rock covers. I did write a few songs but I was getting really fed up with the rock thing. I guess everybody was. It was okay and it was a laugh but I felt I needed to rethink things, play stuff that I was really comfortable with playing and be a bit more true to myself. I just wanted to take it a bit further and do something a bit more trendy. So it was off with the hair and on with the suit and I sat down and started writing songs.

‘I didn’t really get into the punk thing too much. I used to go and watch some of the bands like The Jam and The Damned and also saw the Stiff Records tour with Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Elvis Costello and Larry Wallis.

‘I also knew Pete Thomas [drummer with The Attractions] when he was in Lewes and he was a good inspiration in a way ‘cos he was doing exactly the things I was, playing in bands round Lewes and then suddenly he just went ‘I’m going to be a pop star now’ and off he went. I thought ‘Of course you are Pete’ and the next thing – wow – he had done it.’

‘I knew Jez Bird to say hello to at school. I think he was a year younger than me and I knew he’d played in bands.

I got him into Shakedown as a guitar player as we always had two guitar players then but, shortly after that, I decided to quit the band and start something new.’

Lambrettas ‘I hatched the whole thing with a lovely guy called John Gosling. His family come from Lewes and lived on East Street by the bus station. He’s just a pretty cool dude. He now lives in London and runs a dance label and does really very well. He was always pretty on the button as to what was going on and he came round wearing a parka and said ‘You love all this ‘60s stuff. That’s what you should be doing. There’s all this mod thing going on. It’s right up your street. This is the style that’s going to happen’ I’m making it sound like it was very contrived but we did it because we loved it.

‘I think the actual name was down to me. We had a few slatings later on for being called that because people felt it was corny but when we first started out the new mod scene was a small clique. There weren’t even any mod clothes in the shops and we had no idea at the time that the whole thing was going to go mainstream.

‘I was aware of the mod scene a bit.

The Jam sort of kicked it off as they had the suits, the Ben Shermans and the Union Jacks. There was a big scene in London at a pub called The Bridge House in the East End where Secret

Above, Oakenlode rehearsing in the Scout Hut in Lewes.

Main image First band shot of The Lambrettas outside the Scout Hut.

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Rare 1978 Shakedown single on the Kricon label.

Cover designed by Bob Palmer.

JEZ BIRD

An insight into the early musical activities of Jez Bird, before he was in Shakedown and The Lambrettas, is given by Andy Shand, who was with him in the 6th form of Lewes Priory.

Andy was the bass player in a Lewes band called Rough Justice [late 1973/1975] which featured Ralph Brown on sax and vocals.

Ralph played Danny the drug dealer in Withnail and I, has had a distinguished acting career since and now sings with the Brighton Beach Boys. Andy later played in a Brighton band called The Numbers with his brother but in-between he was recruited by Jez to join what he describes as ‘the reigning Lewes Priory band of the time’.

Called Pilgrim it was a band which featured Frank McCarthy (lead guitarist/lead vocals ), Jez Bird [vocals/rhythm guitar], Jeremy (drums) with Andy on bass and occasional vocals. He says they played ‘quite ambitious rock and roll covers and the musicianship was very much a step up.’ He shared his memories of Jez with the LME: ‘We did two years of geography together which included field trips up to the Highlands of Scotland.

When I think of Jez at school he was very much the class clown. He wasn’t the most academic person but he was fun to be around in class and he was appreciated for that and teased about it by his teachers. He was a very humorous, good-natured, cheerful guy and sometimes extremely funny. He was a character, put it that way and that obviously found its outlets through music as well.

‘From the musical perspective, in Pilgrim he was confident playing a Les Paul copy and he played very well, very convincingly. We played mainly village halls and parties and we also had a side project doing four-part harmonies and covering stuff like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Jez was very serious about it. It wasn’t that he lost his sense of humour by any means but it was obviously something that he really cared about and was willing to put time into. He definitely had a work ethic in terms of music.’ Sadly, Jez Bird died in Lewes at the age of 50 on the 28th August 2008.

Affair used to play. It was just before the Two-Tone thing which sort of broke out from it and just went huge.

‘I said to Jez do you want to do this with me or do you want to stay with what you’re doing. I think this is a whole lot of a better thing and he said yes let’s do it. Then we found Mark Ellis the bass player then Paul Wincer the drummer.

‘When we very first started playing together in Shakedown we both played guitars and sang backing vocals. With The Lambrettas, I suggested that Jez was better suited to singing and that I should do the guitar playing. He was a pretty good lead singer as it turned out.

LAMBRETTAS LAUNCH/ GO STEADY ‘In the spring of 1979, the mod revival was gathering momentum... in the East End of London the Bridge House had been holding regular Mods Monday nights which culminated in a “Mods Mayday ’79” event and live album. In June that year The Lambrettas made their live debut on Hastings Pier. We weren’t even advertised to appear. They just stuck us on the bill and we went down so well. This guy said “I’ll be your manager”. He got us some gigs in London and within about a month we had a deal for a single. It was very quick from nowhere to getting somewhere.”

Source: Jez Bird, Obituary by Pierre Perrone, The Independent (31.10.08)

The new band opened the show at their first gig – on Hastings Pier [9th June 1979]. Also on the bill were The Fixations, The Teenbeats, The Scooters and headliners The Purple Hearts. The Lambrettas were a last- minute addition to the bill and were not announced on the poster. On the 30th June they played in the Paddock in Lewes, supported by Chaos. Brighton gigs followed at The Buccaneer, The Alhambra, The Richmond, Brighton Art College and The Basement.

‘I don’t know how we managed to worm our way into that. I think Peter Haines the promoter just felt sorry for us. At the time we only had seven songs. After the show he offered to be our manager and got us a record deal, bless him. He was easy to take the piss

Below: Publicity shot of the band with Mike Stoller, the co-composer with Jerry Leiber of ‘Poison Ivy’.

Below right: The band outside the record shop on School Hill, Lewes.

out of because he’s quite a meek chap, very middle-class and mild-mannered but he did a good job.

‘I remember first off we had a bit of interest from someone quite big like CBS and then almost immediately after someone from Elton John’s label Rocket Records came to speak to us and said they were planning an album with 12 bands each doing one track. The album was called 499 2139 and that was the phone number you had to call to audition to get on the album. We didn’t have to do that because they asked us.

Then the people who bought the album had to phone and vote for the band they preferred the best.

‘We recorded a song called ‘Go Steady’ which was meant for the album but Rocket decided they want to pull it off and release it as a single [in 1979] so we did a one-off deal. I remember Peter Haines coming into the Hard Rock Cafe waving a cheque for £5000.

We thought we were millionaires.

‘Mike Read played it a lot on his Radio 1 evening show and it got to about 90 something in the chart. We thought that was pretty damn good because at that time there were something like 60 or 70 singles being released every week. Mike was good to us. Jez and I knew him quite well.

He came to several of our gigs and sat in our dressing room twanging away on the guitar.

‘Go Steady’ was a springboard which got us a full deal with the label and they assigned Peter Collins to us as our producer. A small bloke who walked around in a cowboy hat, he had a production company with Pete Waterman who was Rocket Record’s A&R man at the time.’

‘While 1979 was when 2-Tone exploded on the UK music scene,

that summer also saw the resurrection of another musical tribe: The Mods. The 2-Tone and Mod movements had many similarities. While 2-Tone looked to the rude boys of Jamaica and the early ska, rocksteady and reggae for inspiration, the mods of the late 70s worshipped The Who and The Jam. The release of the movie "Quadrophenia" in the summer of 1979 set off a mod band revival which mirrored the 2-Tone bands in many ways. The bands who followed in the wake of The Jam included Secret Affair, The Chords, The Purple Hearts and The Lambrettas.

Source: http://marcoonthebass.blogspot.co.uk/2008/ 09/lambrettas-mod-revival-band-embraces-2.html

POISON IVY It was Pete Waterman who suggested the band do a cover of ‘Poison Ivy’, a song written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, first recorded by The Coasters, which became a major hit in 1959.

Their ska-inflected version was released in 1980. It reached No 7 in the charts and sold 250,000 copies which earned the band a silver disc.

‘The guys at Rocket were pretty good although sometimes it seemed they had more money than good ideas. I remember them thinking up a couple of really naff promotional things.

‘The thing I hated the most was when we released ‘Poison Ivy’ and they issued the first 5,000 copies with a different sleeve on a spoof label called 2-Stroke which was a bit of a piss-take against 2-Tone. [The porkpie hatted silhouette produced by Walt Jabsco was replaced with a look-alike knock-off featuring a parka-wearing Mod.] They thought it

was funny but we thought it was very uncool. Those singles now change hands for quite a bit of money.’

‘It was released in 1980 and things went a bit crazy pretty quick because, starting in April, May and June, it just got played to death on every station on the radio. It was quite good because it went up and down the charts slowly and that was a lot better from a sales point of view.

‘It was a Marquee gig where it really hit home [24th June or 1st July 1980]. The support band came on and we were due to take the stage in half an hour but there was hardly anybody there. We were thinking maybe there’s not going to be that many people. But literally about 20 minutes before we went on, we went outside and there was a queue which you just couldn’t see the end of and the club was absolutely jam packed sold out and a lot of people got turned away.

‘I can remember that when I came out of the dressing room and walked on stage everyone moved forward and a heat wave knocked me back.

I just touched my guitar and everybody went “Wha Hey” and I thought this is going to be easy.

We’ve got this one sewn up. I’d had a lot of years to get to that point.

I’d done my apprenticeship.

‘At one of these Marquee gigs, Mike Read came on stage and presented each of us with silver discs.’

‘After that, things were crazy for a couple of years with a lot of gigging and TV and radio stuff. We did ‘Top of The Pops’ about five or six times – three or four times with ‘Poison Ivy’ and then twice with the next single.

You couldn’t do it the following week it had to be in two weeks time and you would only get on if the record was going up the charts.

‘We also did ‘Cheggers Plays Pop’, ‘Rock Stage’ [in Nottingham/23 July 1980] and ‘Tiswas’. That was quite cool because it was a Saturday morning children’s programme which was watched by adults as well. We performed a couple of songs while they threw pies at us and while we were being interviewed, they dropped a massive inflatable elephant on us.’

Following their success with ‘Poison Ivy’, the band also released their first album ‘Beat Boys In The Jet Age’ (which reached No 28 in the charts).

The first single from the album ‘Da-aa-ance’ reached No 12 and was also released as a picture disc. In August 1980, a second single from the album reached No 49. That track was titled ‘Page 3’ and was a pop at The Sun’s Page Three glamour girls.

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Photo source: www.walesonline.co.uk

When released as a single, the tabloid paper threatened legal action and the band were forced to change the title to ‘Another Day, Another Girl’ and destroy the original, already manufactured, sleeves. They played the Brighton Top Rank on the 10th August, supported by the Dolly Mixtures.

In 1981, the band released their second album ‘Ambience’ and three singles – ‘Good Times’, ‘Anything You Want’ and ‘Decent Town’ – none of which achieved chart success.

Their drummer Paul Wincer was replaced by Steve Bray (former

drummer with Toyah Wilcox) who was, in turn, later replaced by Pat Freyne.

‘I don’t know what it was really.

I think there were certain movements between the band and the record company that maybe we should change him for various reasons.

Personally I thought it was a pointless exercise. Our music publisher Eric Hall always said ‘Never change a winning act.’

In 1982, they released their eighth and final single, a cover of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’. For the cover shot, they ditched their Mod

look. for more casual clothes. By April 1982 it was all over.

‘The last gig we did was at The Venue in Victoria on April 14th. We’d got some brass and backing singers in as we knew that it was going to be the last gig. There was a lot of people there and it was good.

‘We didn’t fall out but I think it had just got a bit lacklustre. It was becoming hard work and we just decided to call it a day. Everyone felt the same thing. It’s still really good. Let’s knock it on the head now and not become some declining cabaret act. Let’s just finish as we started out – with a bang.’

MADNESS MONSTER TOUR

were riot police in there. You know...

"I'm an Italian and I want to see a gig. I don’t need a ticket. It was brilliant.

Really brilliant."’

In 1980, The Lambrettas did an 18-date tour of Europe supporting Madness, starting in Italy on the 9th October and ending in Norway on the 4th November, with gigs in Belgium, France, Germany and Sweden in between, mainly in 20,000-seater stadiums. At the third gig of the tour at the Padua Palasport (Oct 11th) it all kicked off: ‘There is a riot which is caused by a variety of events. There is an Italian anarchistic movement who don’t believe in paying to see bands. Lee [Thompson] and Chris [Foreman] are watching the Lambrettas and see a crowd of these hippyish types force their way in using machetes and baseball bats to smash windows and then have a battle with riot police who are using tear gas managing to gas themselves in the process. Very Italian job.

Woody [Dan Woodgate]:"Italy was just phenomenal. I mean it really was incredible. They had a five year ban or something on all live acts in Italy from foreign lands and we came in to maniac crowds. It was just such a buzz.

They went really potty in Padaova. They came through the glass panelings with sledgehammers and axes and there

Having driven 500 miles from Rome to Innsbruck, a further 500 miles the next day to Cologne, and another 130 miles the bands arrive in Amsterdam.

The Lambrettas have two days off but Madness don’t. They have to do some press on the first day (Oct 17th) and a tv show on the next with The Specials.

Derek Haggar, the Lambretta’s roadie, born and bred in Lewes, has been a friend of Doug’s before the band even formed and has been doing most of the their gigs since 1980. This is his memory of the situation: ‘We were in Amsterdam in the American Hotel and Dougie and the rest of us were sitting in the bar and there was Suggs and one of the other guys from Madness sitting there with long faces and I said what’s the matter and they said we were going to have a night off to have some beers but we’ve got to go and do these press interviews on a canal boat. Anyway about 20 minutes later they came rushing in laughing and I said I thought you were supposed to be on the boat. They said we were but we managed to get on the roof of the boat and when we were going underneath a bridge we grabbed it and climbed up. Sometime later the

next thing we heard was the chaos when their Manager Kelloggs walked in shouting his head off. He’d had the police, the fire brigade and everybody else out looking for them as he thought they’d fallen overboard and been drowned! That was bit hectic.’

‘On October 18th, Madness appeared with The Specials on a Dutch tv show.

They both play live on stages next to each other and during The Specials set the stage collapses due to a stage invasion which has by now become a tradition. The tour then continues with the Lambrettas supporting.’

Source: The Ascent of Madness http://archive.today/kwqH#selection-1243.0-1457.18

Source: The Ascent of Madness http://archive.today/kwqH#selection-1243.0-1457.18

Doug told a fanzine ‘Mad not Mad’: ‘The last night of the tour we played ‘Poison Ivy’ last and as we started Suggs and a couple of the other guys came on stage behind us with a huge chart with the words written on it and pointed them out with a large stick as were singing them. They called us the “Rocking Lambos”.’ Paul Wincer recalls: “...walking round a dodgy German (or could be French) housing estate with Suggs looking for an equally dodgy party we’d been asked to.”

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LAMBRETTAS REVIVAL The event that really brought The Lambrettas back to life was ‘Modrophenia ‘79’ billed as ‘A celebration of 30 years of Mod Revival & the film ‘Quadrophenia’ held on 15th of August 2009. The event featured a mass scooter ride-out from Beachy Head to Brighton, followed by a concert at the Concorde 2 featuring The Lambrettas supported by Mark Joseph and The Modcats and Timebomb & The Hiwatts.

‘The organisers called me up and said can you reform as The Lambrettas without Jez. At first I thought it was out of the question but then I thought about it some more and gave Paul a ring to see if he was up for it. Mark wasn’t available because he now lives in the States. We decided we’d give it a try and I decided to do the lead vocal and play some guitar but also to get another guitarist. So we got two new guys in – Chris Venzi-James on bass and Phil Edwards on guitar.

‘So we did the gig in Brighton and as we were rehearsed-up we thought if anyone offers us any more gigs we’ll do a few. Since then the phone just hasn’t stopped going. It’s crazy.

‘Starting this September we’ve got absolutely bundles of gigs and our back catalogue, which hasn’t been available for ten years, is being released by a London-based company called Union Square as a double CD with the album ‘Beat Boys In The Jet Age’ together with an album of singles and B-sides. In addition, in February next year, a DVD of a concert that was filmed by ITV back in the day is to be released for the first time. We are working on new material and hope to have an EP of new stuff out around the same time.

‘There’s another Mod revival going on with us, from The Jam, Secret Affair and The Purple Hearts all working hard.

We just did the Mods Mayday in Dublin and we were all staying in the same hotel. The landlord said come on lads five more minutes and it was 5 in the morning.’ CF

www.thelambrettas.co.uk

EwordsLEjohn warburton A loosely-knit community of musicians in Lewes and the surrounding area are united in their interest in playing works from the vast wealth of instrumental and vocal music that predates the traditional Classical repertoire. Red Priest, one of the leading ensembles of this Early Music movement, is based in our town as are many players from the acclaimed Orchestra of the Age of The Enlightenment, who regularly play and record at Glyndebourne and across Europe. Lewes also has the Baroque and Roll String Orchestra, which is open to any young people who want to experience playing this early music. In addition, some of the finest early music keyboard instruments are made in a workshop in the Cliffe.

BAROQUE

‘N’ ROLL E arly Music is a term that encompasses European works dating from the first written music in the 9th century through mediaeval times, the Renaissance and the Baroque eras to the early 1800s – long before the existence of orchestras or even concerts themselves. Instruments included viols, lutes, brass instruments without valves, crumhorns, early forms of the oboe and a variety of percussion and keyboard instruments including the organ, the clavichord, virginals and the harpsichord. The piano was not invented until the 18th century.

For the Early Music movement, rediscovering the style of playing and singing these old pieces is just as important as the notes themselves.

Styles of Early Music range from dances of all kinds to highly emotional love songs for troubadours but the largest body of Early Music that survives to the present day is sacred church music because the secular music was generally not written down.

For Julia Bishop, violinist for Red Priest, playing Early Music is deeply connected to the ethos of Bonfire. She told the LME: “I'm part of Bonfire, and its exhibitionism. What I do with the violin is bring these early music compositions to life in the same way that the Bonfire societies bring that history to life. Bonfire is raw and we want to bring out the rawness of the origins of our music. Did you know that Guy Fawkes was executed at the same time that the first opera was bring written in 1606?”

Some of the music is raw indeed: the famous ‘Sumer is icumen in’ was found in the collection of William of Winchester, a 13th century monk who was punished for his illicit “incontinence” with nuns, and scholars agree that the lyric ‘bucke uerteth’ means ‘the billy-goat farts’.

Cellist Catherine Black notes that throughout the history of Early Music, pieces for dancing were consistently important. “When I was playing cello for Moby [the highly successful American

electronic musician] the connections between Baroque dance and today's electronic dance music style became very clear. So much Baroque music is really about the groove and it was only later that composers, like Bach, formalized the music. Bass was intrinsic in Early Music.

In fact the pioneering musician Claudio Monteverdi [1567-1643], composer of first opera Orfeo, invented the 'walking bass' and that is where the new world of harmony began” Catherine also relates the story of English composer John Dowland, whose famous lute song from 1596 ‘Flow, My Tears’ became an international hit through what today we'd call remixes.

“Over a hundred different arrangements were made all over Europe after Dowland couldn't find work with Queen Elizabeth's court.” In recent times, both Sting and Elvis Costello have recorded versions of Dowland's songs.

While early church music was very formal, much Early Music was played for everyday occasions. “Audiences were far more casual in those days” says Julia. “People would walk in and out, eat and drink, have conversations. Farmers would pass through with their goats.

The music went on for hours. People didn't sit in rows like they do today.”

According to Julia, early composers and musicians could be just flawed in their personalities as some of today's celebrities. “Gesualdo, a writer of beautiful courtly love-songs, killed his own wife and her lover, and then his son. It is said that when Arcangelo Corelli played the violin his eyes went red and he became a demon.”

Catherine and Julia collaborate on Lewes's Baroque and Roll String Orchestra which Julia says, is about making Early Music accessible and relevant to kids today: “Baroque is so maverick, so over-the-top, so colourful, that it suits the wildness of children's imagination, with no limits. We bring in old manuscripts so our learners can see the old notation, with signs they don't know, and while others are learning the notes we'll get some of the children out of their seats to dance the minuet that is in the music. We'd love to put on a whole opera like this, maybe ‘Dido and Aeneas’, with costumes and the full treatment. The whole thing must come to life for children”.

Many of the Early Music instruments – such as viols, clavichords and various members of the lute family – are not used by modern orchestras and for many years musicians had a hard time finding copies of them.

Catherine is delighted that now factories around the world are beginning to rediscover these old designs. “You can now get copies of Baroque instruments, even viols and their bows, from China. We've been given some more instruments to let children play on, including a lovely three-quarter cello for someone young to use. Never has it been so easy to learn in Baroque style.”

“We're passionate about getting classical music away from its middleclass, luxurious image, and from its staidness”, added Julia. “What we want to do is get these instruments into children's hands.” CF

RED PRIEST [Left to right]: Piers Adams (recorders), Angela East (cello), Julia Bishop (violin) and David Wright (Keyboards)

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Julia and Catherine photos: Carly Susu.

Caroline Brown

KArin Richter

Julia Bishop

Julia is one of Britain's leading Baroque violinists, with a style described by BBC Music Magazine as “psychedelic”. She played in The English Concert for six years, before forming her own ensemble in Lewes, Red Priest, in 1997 with her husband, the virtuoso recorder player Piers Adams. They are the only early music group in the world to have been compared to the Rolling Stones. They have been featured many times in documentaries and performance programmes including an hour-long profile on ITV's “The South Bank Show”.

Julia launched the Red Hot Baroque Show in 2005, a “marriage of old music with the latest light and video technology”. Other shows performed around the world include “Priest on the Run”, “Nightmare in Venice”, “Pirates of the Baroque” and “Johann, I'm Only Dancing”. Red Priest have their own record label and give away free ringtones of their performances. Julia has also performed on recordings by Deutsche Grammophon and other labels and plays with other ensembles: the Gabrieli Consort, the Brandenburg Consort, Florilegium and The Hanover Band. CF

CATHERINE BLACK

Catherine is at the progressive end of the historically-informed performance movement. After leaving college, she worked both as a freelance orchestral player and as a member of the cabaret trio Premier Cru, who performed jazz standards at the Edinburgh Festival and at venues like Ronnie Scott's. She formed Instru-Mental, a six-piece ambient dance music group, who played at The Big Chill and Electric Party In The Park, with a repertoire that included music by Brian Eno and The Orb. Her session musician work has included playing with Boyzone, Roxette, The Divine Comedy, and Demis Roussos. Her parallel career as a teacher has led her to co-found the Baroque and Roll String Orchestra. As a composer, her three volumes of ‘Time Pieces for Cello’ have been published by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. CF

BRIGHTON EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL

This autumn saw the 12th year of the Brighton Early Music Festival [BREMF] which has established itself as one of the best such festivals in Britain, with over 6,000 people attending concerts, and with an international selection of a hundred or more players, conductors and singers who perform music in the style the composers originally intended, hundreds of years ago.

The festival's co-founders, Deborah Roberts and Clare Norburn are both performers themselves with a clever sensitivity for finding the relevance of old music to today's audiences.

The Festival's education programme has once again reached around 1,200 schoolchildren. By visiting schools, specialist musicians have been showing young people how old music is played, and offering a rare

Karin's training was first as a furniture maker in Brighton, followed by two years' training in Germany, learning to restore historic musical instruments, Her clavichords, made in Lewes since the mid-1980s, are world-renowned and have been played by the greatest players of the present era, including Christopher Kite and Gustav Leonhardt. Karin's instruments are well-known for their evenness of touch, strength of tone and reliability. Today, in addition to her work as a clavichord maker, she is secretary of the British Clavichord Society, and helps to curate the annual concert series at the workshop she shares in Lewes with harpsichord maker Malcolm Rose. The twenty-third series began this autumn. CF

A Hove resident, cellist Caroline Brown founded The Hanover Band, one of the world's leading historically-informed orchestras, in 1980. Since then under her leadership, the orchestra has created an international reputation for the quality of its authentic performances and recordings of 18th and 19th century music.

She says: “We really were pioneers. The authentic performance movement went like a whoosh, and other people have followed in our footsteps.”

Caroline's studies began with a scholarship as a Junior Exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music and further studies at the Vienna Academy of Music. Her orchestral playing developed through her two-year membership of the Scottish Ballet Orchestra for two years, and as a member of the Sadlers Wells Ballet Orchestra. Trinity College of Music awarded her the MA in 1998 and she was further honoured two years later with an Honorary Doctorate in Music from the University of Sussex. The instrument she plays was originally made in 1764 and has been restored in order to produce its original 18th century sound. She also plays with Cristofori. CF

ALISON BURY

A Lewes resident, Alison Bury is a founder member, director, soloist and leader of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment who regularly play at Glyndebourne for performances of the operas of Handel and other baroque composers. In the 2007 season, she led the OAE in the Glyndebourne dramatisation of Bach's ‘St Matthew Passion’ and in 2009 Purcell's ‘The Fairy-Queen’ and Handel's ‘Julio Cesare’.

For more than 20 years, Alison was leader of the English Baroque Soloists who made numerous recordings and toured in Europe, Australia, the U.S.A. and the Far East. Alison started playing

the Baroque violin while a student at the Royal College of Music. After completing her studies there she won a Boise Scholarship to study at the Salzburg Mozarteum with Sandor Vegh and Nikolaus Harnancourt. While in Austria she performed and recorded with Concentus Musicus of Vienna.

Her additional solo work includes performances and recordings with the Academy of Ancient Music, the Raglan Baroque Players and the Taverner Players. Alison and Julia Bishop are often co-leaders of The Baroque Collective for concerts in Lewes. CF

opportunity to be hands-on with rare instruments and musical works. Young people aged between 12 and 25 are also offered concessionary prices for all the public educational workshops.

This year, as well as concerts in the halls and churches of Brighton, chosen mainly for their acoustic properties, the Orchestra of the Age of The Enlightenment gave a late-evening concert in a pub setting, while another audience was given masks and wine-glasses to re-enact a Venetian masked ball.

In this year's festival alone, Brighton's audiences have heard a re-creation of a performance by one of Shakespeare's most shameless actors, ethereal and sensuous music written for young nuns in Renaissance Paris, and unusual dances and romances brought from Africa by Portuguese musicians of the 16th century.

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EwordsLEjohn may

Yellow Fish

omewhere tucked away in the woods outside Lewes is a very special music facility housed in a nondescript industrial building. It’s where the magic happens, which is why Roger Daltrey used it to record the fabulous ‘Going Back Home’ album with Wilko Johnson and also did the vocals and overdubs for the new Who album ‘Be Lucky’ and where Chris Difford produced The Strypes – and that’s just this year.

We’re with Ross McCracken, 35year-old CEO of Yellow Fish, who’s giving me the back story of how it came to be. At 15 he was playing drums badly in a terrible hard rock band and promoting gigs in East Grinstead with a friend. By 18, he had dropped the drumming and was managing and producing bands and, by 21, had made enough money to buy a flat – which he then sold, moving onto a boat where he lived for seven years – and invested his own money in building a studio from scratch.

For a brief period, he had an older business partner who was working with the Pretty Things and Arthur Brown but, after an amicable split, the only things left in the empty building were Ross and an aquarium with one yellow fish in it. His designer colleague suggested the name, which Ross hated at first, but he now feels it’s distinctive and has worked in their favour.

Ross was a member of one of the

S

last generations to learn how to work with 2-inch analog tape and mix it straight down to DAT. At that time there was no digital. One aspect of the digital revolution has been that many studios have gone to the wall because musicians can now home record. Ross explains the USP elements that have enabled Yellow Fish to survive and thrive.

Firstly, they maintain a mixture of analog and digital equipment, enabling them to combine the quality of analog with the convenience of digital.

Secondly, they have maintained a large main recording room [approx 1,400 sq ft] which makes them unusual as most studios have converted theirs into a series of tinier spaces. As a result, they attract clients that literally can’t do what they want to do, which is record live with a big band. The biggest they’ve accommodated so far is a 22-piece.

Then there’s the sound: “We have a lot of engineers and producers come in and they look at the room and they think the ceiling’s too low. Then they give it a go and they all come out saying it’s a fantastic sounding room.

“What’s nice about it is that it’s controllable. You can make it sound anyway you want to. We have plenty of screens and can create different separations. We’ve got a very good reputation for drum sounds. We can bring the sound in really tight but we

are one of very few studios who can also get a big open drum sound.

Finally, there’s the performance: “We capture a performance and not just a recording. That’s where the magic happens. You throw a bunch of people in a room together, spend the morning setting up and then you press the go button and see what happens.

“That’s our unique thing which, funnily enough, is the least unique thing because it’s going back to how it used to be.”

Yellow Fish also have extensive facilities and equipment for archiving, another important aspect of their

business, but the thing they’re most chuffed about at the moment is their new mobile studio housed in a beautiful Airstream trailer.

It’s an unusual vehicle as it is a modern version with a narrower body built exclusively for the Japanese market. Virtually none were imported to the UK but Ross did find this one in Essex.

“It’s one of the most advanced mobiles in Europe that we’re aware of. It was a fully-fitted caravan when we got it so we took everything out and completely re-worked and rewired the interior. It has technology in there that enables us to do things no mobile studio has done before.”

One interesting detail is that each wheel of the vehicle has been fitted with

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computer-controlled motor-movers which means, when unhitched from its trailer, it can be edged into the tightest of spots making it one of the largest remote-controlled vehicles in the world.

“With this,” says Ross, “we’ve discovered a new market: rock stars who can’t even be bothered to go out!” If they do fancy combining recording with a bit of sunshine, Yellow Fish also offer a top-end recording facility at Faro in Portugal, in a five-bedroom villa with a pool.

His summary of the state of affairs in music right now: “Survival is the new success. If you are still making a living in the music game then you’re doing well.” CF www.yellowfishmusicgroup.com

EwordsLEpeter messer

Last Words arrived at Lewes County Grammar School for Boys in the late ‘60s, a new kid from a school of high pretension and low achievement. It was a culture shock.

I walked straight into a classroom purple with the unfamiliar aroma of joss sticks burning in the inkwells. I remember a teacher opening the door and muttering “Smells like a brothel in a bad area” and slamming it again. I was impressed that the teachers knew words like ‘brothel’.

Somebody introduced me to Pete Thomas whose opening greeting was “I don’t suppose you play guitar by any chance?” The answer was, regrettably, no but I privately resolved to do something about it. I realized I wasn’t in Purley anymore and there was more than incense in the air.

My previous school was full of music fans. They carried modish longplaying records under their arms and illuminated the names of their favourite artists on their exercise books in improvised blobby psychedelic script.

They wore their hair as long as they dared, almost to the collar, but nobody seemed to actually play.

Lewes was certainly different.

There were people with instruments, and when I met Keith Morley, of subsequent Scritti Politti fame, I was astounded that anyone could be allowed to have so much hair. I remember his explosive ‘Disraeli Gears’ style dandelion clock. The rumour was that his first year school cap was still in there somewhere.

At the end of my first year there was the School Revue and Pete’s band The Grobs played. They were loud and, in my opinion, brilliant. I hadn’t seen much live music and the idea that people my own age, people I actually knew, could sound like a proper band

I

The Band With No Name (Left to right): Tracy Drewett (bass), Malcolm Paisley (guitar), Pete Messer (guitar), Tom Beard (drums), Chris Durrant (guitar)

was intoxicating. There was nothing apologetic about it, no sense of ‘not bad for their age, considering’. They were really doing it and it made me and many others want to.

Admittedly, their Revue thunder was somewhat stolen later by Pete Coley’s manic, unhinged impersonation of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, dancing on one foot and kicking himself repeatedly in the testicles with the other, meanwhile playing the flute. I guess you had to be there.

In 1969 the old order changed forever. We were now Lewes Priory, a Comprehensive School three times the size, spread over three sites and with girls.

Nobody, least of all the staff, knew who was supposed to be where and it became a skiver’s paradise. People brought guitars, dope and fishing tackle to school then sort of disappeared for the rest of the day.

I left in 1970, aged sixteen and armed with four trusty O levels (Art, English, History and French, since you ask). Because I didn’t live in Lewes, I drifted away, living and working in London and Brighton and only returning for the odd pub-based reunion with school mates. I lost close touch with much of what was happening musically in the Lewes area.

Sometime in the ‘70s, I was living in a bedsit in Brighton listening to John Peel playing a rather mesmerizing track called ‘(I’d Go)The Whole Wide World’

and back-announcing it as being by “Eric Goulden of Newhaven aka Wreckless Eric”. I needed to sit down for a while. I’d really liked the record and it was by Eric Bloody Goulden, another ex-Priory boy. Now there really was hope for everybody I thought.

By that time, I myself had begun my long career as a failed musician. The photograph above shows us in the white-hot furnace of early ‘70s creativity in an outfit that had no name and played only a couple of ramshackle, no-account gigs.

Tracy, Tom and myself then went on to form a band called The Crowned Heads of Europe which played at places in Brighton like the Bombay Bar and The Alhambra. Meanwhile Malcolm and Chris joined up with Lewesians John Collins and Kev Turrell to form Bad

Squeeze play firle

s a warm-up for their national tour, Squeeze frontmen and songwriters Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, along with John Bentley, Stephen Large and Simon Hanson played all their greatest hits outside The Ram in Firle on the 4th July to an enthusiastic crowd who had found their way to this “secret” gig. Difford is now a local resident and has promised to give the LME an interview for our next issue. Watch this space.

Photos: John Warburton

A

See: www.squeezeofficial.com

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Admittedly, their Revue thunder was somewhat stolen later by Pete Coley’s manic, unhinged impersonation of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, dancing on one foot and kicking himself repeatedly in the testicles with the other, meanwhile playing the flute.

News, a blues/rock band still fondly recalled by the Friday night pugilists of The Lamb in the late ‘70s and early ’80s.

As I write these words, The Contenders – a Lewes-based four-piece band which includes John Collins on bass and me on guitar and harp and which has played more than 100 gigs over the last six years - are about to head off to perform three gigs in Lewes’ twin town - Waldshut-Tiengen in Germany. The race is not always to the swiftest! CF

FIGHT!

Editorial

THE PETER GREEN RIOT

As you will have gathered by now, the core of this issue is a big oral history exercise about music in Lewes in the ‘70s.

I’ve lost count of all the interviews we conducted and there was far too much material for us to include everything we discovered. What was most interesting was where there were contradictory accounts of the same incident and the best example of this we’ve saved for the end. Maybe readers of this piece will be able to shed further light on the matter.

If so, we’ll print a follow-up in the next issue which will be we hope in Spring 2015.

The event in question concerns a concert by the legendary blues guitarist Peter Green at Priory School in Lewes in 1971. He had left Fleetwood Mac the year before.

We were first alerted to this by Pete Thomas [See p.15] who considered that night “the most pivotal thing that happened as far as we [The Grobs] were concerned.”

We begin with his account: ‘It was Peter Green and Friends. The guitarist was Tim Renwick who was brilliant. He had a band called Quiver and he later played with Mike & The Mechanics, Eric Clapton’s band and with me on ‘The Jonathan Ross Show’. The drummer was called Timmy Donaldson and the bass player was called Honk. He had bare feet. Pete Green had the full caftan and the beads. I can still remember all this because it was such a big deal.

‘Also on the bill was another band called Hackensack, a sort of period hard- rock hair band and they showed up with a Ford Transit with lights on the back for when you open the doors and they had big amps. We were just thrilled to bits watching this thing from the second they showed up.

‘The Grobs played first then Hackensack then Pete Green came on. I don’t know what he played but it wasn’t like any Fleetwood Mac songs or anything. It was just like jamming and it went on and on and on. In the end, the Headmaster, whose nickname was Charlie, he had to stop it and he came on the stage and got the microphone and just said this has got to stop now and at that point the whole thing just went off. I remember getting my floor tom-tom and running up and getting on stage and everybody came and joined in and, far from them getting off, it turned into some sort of school riot.

LEWES musical express Issue Four Winter 2014 www.lewesmusicalexpress.com info@lewesmusicalexpress.com Editorial/Advertising: 01273 471505

Editor/Producer/Writer: John May Designer: Raphael Whittle

‘It was brilliant and then on Monday we all had to go to Assembly and there was this awful ticking off and a few of us had to go to this Headmaster’s study and we all got told off but it was great. That was a complete one-off.

It was a miracle really.’

So far so good: a great tale but Pete did say we should check the details with others. Firstly we came across John Whippy’s account. He put the date of the concert as May 1970 and recalls that he got backstage and Peter Green (his guitar hero) “propped his famous Les Paul up against me whilst he took off his jacket!” In his version of the events, Green’s “scratch band” featured Alex Dmchowski [the bass player from The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation]. He also says that Quiver was on the same bill rather than being Greene’s backing band.

Next comes Phil Langran’s version: “The concert with Peter Green at Priory in 1970/71 was booked by entrepreneur Brian Smith. Peter Green’s line-up included Alex Dmchowski.

Support acts were Quiver and a duo called Mandragon.

I don’t recall The Grobs playing. What I remember most apart from the music, which was extended blues jams, was when the headmaster decided enough was enough and pulled the plug on him.”

Finally, here’s Andrew Ranken’s account: ‘It was a highlight for me more because of the girl I managed to get off with.

It must have been around 1970. There was definitely some trouble because of the volume. I think the headmaster appeared at one point and tried to get them to turn it down, which they weren’t really interested in doing. I believe the guys from a band called Quiver who I didn’t know anything about at the time were his backing band. It was a jam yes.

I don’t think they did any songs I recognised. It was very exciting to have someone like that at our school. I thought he was a fantastic guitarist and it was like a proper gig. “ Naturally we welcome further evidence and anecdotes from you groovers out there. How many more details can we definitively nail down. CF

Sub-Editor/Proof Reader: Nick Hockin Transcriptions: Harriet Hart Contributors Flo Flowers Pete Messer Michael Munday Bob Russell John Warburton Print: The Newspaper Club

The 100 Club Andy Banks Russell Beck Derek Haggar Ed Mawby Mich & Dawn Andrew Thomas Charles Vine

Issues One, Two, Three: 100 Club Mike Marten, Russell Beck, Mike Sullivan, Andy Banks, Nick Davies, Ed Mawby, Simon Smewing, Tony Norman, Manek Dubash, Pelham House/David Anderson, Colin Lloyd, Charlie Dobres, Nigel Atkinson, Phil Pickett, Pete Mobbs, Caroline Dorling, Martin Leeburn, Andrew Thomas, Mich & Dawn, Magnified Learning, Stephen George Arch, Alexander & Bernadette, Jane Whitaker.

Big thank you One of the most unexpected and wonderful gigs of 2014 was staged in The Lamb by this visiting group of French troubadours playing a selection of enchanting medieval melodies with modern lyrics, played on bagpipes, violas, lutes, ivory horns and a variety of percussion instruments. They had the whole place dancing and added magic to the pre-bonfire mood. See: www.lesdernierstrouveres.com

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Photo: John May

Les Derniers Trouvères

Jenny Ross, David Smith, Miles Jenner, Steveie Freeman, Charles Croydon, Cathy Oldale, Michael Gray, Andy Gunton, Ross McCracken, Paul Harrison. Anne & Mark Howes, Pierre Perrone, David Holmes, Neeta Pedersen.

Andy Shand, Pete Thomas, Andrew Ranken, Graham Frost, Kevin Purdie, Phil Langran, Robin Steadman, Roger Lacey, Tom Morley, John Gosling, Nick Patching, John Eccles.