BETWEEN TRUTH & LIES the book

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I don’t like opera and I don’t like ballet and New Wave French movies they just drive me away I guess that I’m dumb ‘cause I know I aint smart and deep down inside I’ve got a Rock ‘n’ Roll heart Lou Reed : Rock ‘n’ Roll Heart

left : circa 1985 right : circa 2011

introduction With the exception of jazz, I listen to a fairly wide variety of music, and as a result I tend to absorb this into my own writing, consequently, each track on Between Truth & Lies, collected from songs written over a period of about twenty five years, finds itself adopting a different genre - this is not by design, it’s just because that’s what I do.

The album was recorded and produced by Mark Creswell, with a little bit of help from myself. I wrote the basis of all the songs, recorded the vocal and rhythm guitar track, and then Mark did all the clever bits, tweaking arrangements, adding melodies and changing the raw product into what it finally ended up as.

This book aims to give a little bit of a background to that final product.

Early modern art created with first set of felt pens circa 1964

preface My relationship with Rock ‘n’ Roll goes way back.

At a time when my eight year old contemporaries were either playing football or constructing Mies van der Rohe facsimiles out of Meccano, me and my best mate Robert Fairbotham were embarking on a life-long expedition, intrepidly exploring the wonderful world of the sensational Hit Parade. Fuelled by sneak previews of his elder brother Hedley’s most recent vinyl purchases (snatched whilst he was out of the house), we would head off to our personal Mecca, the newsagent across the road, to spend our pocket money on magazines containing the holy grail of holy grails – Pop Pictures. These photographs of glittering teen idols such as Peter Noone, Cliff Richard and Reg Presley, sandwiched between comic strip romances and problem pages, were our ambrosia. Invariably these magazines (Jackie, Valentine, Fab 208) were intended for girls, but we didn’t let this get in the way,

because after all, a picture was a picture and, with the aid of some gloy glue and a pair of scissors, we could construct our ‘Shrine to Pop’ (a vast photomontage of our idols stuck on our respective bedroom walls) – such was the extent of our new obsession.

We even formed a band – The Two Fits – comprising of me on vocals and a plastic Beatles guitar (occasionally wearing an accompanying plastic Beatles wig that cut into your ears) and Rob on drums made out of cardboard boxes and a biscuit tin. I’m sure that the songs we played were highly meaningful for a pair of pre-pubescent Junior School boys from the suburbs of Birmingham, but for some reason I can’t seem to recall any of them - the fact that I didnt even know what a chord was at the time might have had something to do with their enduring obscurity. However, I do remember our stage outfits – black body suits adorned with the image of a skeleton from neck to foot (we also had a pyrotechnic stage show to go with them, created from Rob’s chemistry set) – sadly, these groundbreaking costumes and stage shows only ever existed in my head - but I can assure you, they would have been truly magnificent, if only they’d seen the light of day.

Anyway, that was it really, at the age of eight I’d made the leap of faith, and had wholeheartedly joined the congregation of the Church of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

facing page: Weston Super-Mare above left to right: First photograph . Waggy Newsagent across road The Two Fits stage costume Plastic Beatles Guitar below: Plastic Beatles wig

facing page: with Robert Fairbotham circa 1969 below: Solihull Cod With Che Guevara With Dungarees overleaf: 1974 Fine Art . Leeds Poly Plastic Cow Turd, Plastic Fly & Plastic Grass

From then on, throughout my teenage years, my foray into ‘everything Pop’ was confined largely to air guitar accompaniments to the likes of Humble Pie and Ten Years After, interspersed with going to the occasional gig at Birmingham Odeon and Town Hall.

However I did buy a drum kit which I shortly traded in for an Ibanez acoustic guitar followed by a red electric Top Twenty stratocaster copy and a Selmer practice amp (with a tremolo setting) – none of which, I have to admit, amounted to much in terms of musical accomplishment. But it didn’t stop me from joining in the party - I went to see Easy Rider, I bought Hot Rats, I’d signed up to be a member of the Troggs Fan Club (costing me the tidy sum of 7/6d for a years membership), I’d scratched ‘Hendrix is dead but his music lives on’ into the lid of my desk with a compass, I’d even served Dave Hill petrol – but, when it came to making my own contribution, I was still to make anything vaguely resembling a mark in the world of popular music - and I guess that nothing much has changed since.

I left school with one O’level (in Art) and a complete absence of any master plan, only to find myself at Art School, discovering not only myself but the likes of Pop Art, Surrealism, Francis Bacon, The Marx Brothers, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Richard Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp, Dada, The Beat Poets and loads more. For the first time, everything seemed to make sense – so I grew my hair, bought some dungarees, sewed a large psychedelic patch (with an embroidered design of a mushroom) onto the bib, went to the pub nearly every day where I usually consumed about two pints of Ansell’s Bitter and fully immersed myself into the world of art – or, to be more specific, Cow Art - and blissfully climbed aboard the rollercoaster bound for who knows where.

Out of this whirlwind of self-discovery and life-changing experiences came my first ever public rock’n’roll performance.

Solihull Cod, a reference to a euphemism for condoms taken from a poem by Roger McGough, was not so much a band, but more a petulant statement that came out of a late night drunken conversation. At the time, the Sixth Form College had recently opened, and they were having a Xmas Party – so me and my mate Jef (Monk) decided to gatecrash it on the premise that we were art students, and they weren’t. Armed with an acoustic guitar (Jef and his brother Ray) and a megaphone whilst at the same time fashioning a plastic duck attached to my ear and a ‘Wow, I’m really expressing myself’ speech bubble, we performed two numbers before getting thrown out – we never performed again.

At the time, I was quite convinced that, not only was this the end of the band, it was also to be the end of my musical career, having by this time, wholeheartedly taken up the mantel of art – but then Punk came along telling everybody that you didn’t need to know how to play an instrument to be in a band, and suddenly everybody seemed to be doing it. We’d had a whiff of this the previous summer when Green (Gartside) had seen a somewhat anarchic performance by Carlton B Morgan in his home town of Newport involving baguettes and something else that I can’t for the life of me remember. Inspired by this jolly jape, he and I hatched the plan to form a Moaist Punk Rock band – apart from writing half the lyrics to a song “I’m in love with a Moaist guitarist / He’s the one that gets me the highest / Don’t sing no songs about love & hate / Just how he loves the state – it’s great” nothing ever happened. And it seemed quite apparent that this impasse was set to continue, but that didn’t really matter as I had enough obsessional avenues to keep me going - that was until Paul (Staniforth) came metaphorically knocking on my door.

Paul had just bought a guitar and amp with the insurance money he’d received from a motorbike accident, and was bursting with an unbridled desire to form a band. For some strange reason, not only did he want me to be in it, he also wanted me to front it. I argued that I couldn’t play guitar or sing, but he said, to quote the Punk mantra, that that didn’t matter.

facing page: Paul Staniforth below: Based on the opening sentence of The Story of Art where Gombrich dtates ‘ There is no such thing as art, there are only artists” I took it upon myself to call myself and artist from July 1st 1976, and produced a piece of art declaring such . It was even certificated as being art by the Art Certification Service

By this time I had left college and was earnestly considering myself to be a serious artist. At the point that Paul knocked at my door, I was writing an essay called Household Names that was to examine the way that words changed meaning once assimilated into the names of products and how, in the process these labels lost the potency of their original meaning by being replaced with another (for example, Sex Pistols, formerly a euphemism for male genetalia became the collective name for a notorious punk band).

Reluctantly, after a campaign lasting many months, I acquiesced to Paul’s demands, and what was to be an essay, became the name of a band – thus fulfilling it’s own thesis, I guess.

Like everyone’s formative years, Leeds in the late seventies was a diary of heady days interspersed with numerous mornings spent sleeping off the occasional hangover. Punk had brought with it a breath of fresh air that we didn’t realise we needed at the time, creating a new social network that mixed your middle class art students with the kids from the estates – and established both a sense of levelling, as well as a new potential (ironically mixed with a sort of nihilistic fatality). A scene had grown out of a totally unformatted zeitgeist that was destined to burn itself out as soon as the industry got it’s grubby little hands on it – but this didn’t seem to matter, because everybody was enjoying the party while it lasted.

Interestingly, up until the Anarchy in the UK tour at Leeds Poly, the respective Fine Art departments of the Poly and the University never talked to each other – there was an ideological chasm symbolized by the inner city ring road (the urban motorway) that separated the two – but then, galvanized by this 50p, yet highly seminal gig (that for some reason I chose not to attend), the cultural barrier dividing them both, disappeared overnight.

As well as talking, they were entering into cross-campus sexual relationships, drinking in the same pubs and even forming bands.

Now, history would have you believe that Punk came with a pre-prepared manifesto, but it didn’t – it was inventing and defining itself as it went along. That’s why you had girls like Rats & Delicious in suspenders and fish net stockings hanging out

facing page: Gang of Four at The Cellar Bars I went to take a photo of my friend Ricky, seeing me with the camera a young punk called Tony asked to be in the photo, grabbed a girl standing nearby and started snogging her.

Below you can see Rats of Rats & Delicious fame

with boys in black plastic bin liners and Mohican haircuts, as well as others wearing school ties and safety pin earrings, who had forgotten to shave off their moustaches. I distinctly remember at the time going to see The Mekons at a Fireman’s benefit, it was Christmas and most of the students had gone home. The Tech Hall was fairly empty, it’s small audience made up of a couple of dedicated punks and some well-meaning Socialist Workers. In their apology for a throng was a long haired chappy dressed in an RAF greatcoat and a floor-lengthed Doctor Who scarf, who proceeded to pogo across the entire length of the hall. In his own, misguided way he was doing his best to embrace the notion of Punk – thankfully he didn’t deign himself to spit at his fellow punters – because that would have been completely missed the point - it would also have been totally uncool.

facing page: Photo by Peter Mitchell this page : My Maggy Student Union Card

Whilst we’re on the subject of missing the point, MaggieThatcher had recently become leader of the opposition, something that I foolishly thought to be a great joke, having stolen one of her campaign posters from the temporary Tory campaign office in the Merrion Centre with which I screen-printed a homage to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn in her image. Considering her to be the complete antithesis of womanhood and an easy target for ridicule, I believed that this rendered her as a bit of a novelty act – oh how wrong could I have been.

At the same time, the first snowflakes of the winter of discontent were already falling on our leather-jacketed shoulders, the National Front was rearing it’s ugly borstal-tattooed head prompting the formation of the Anti-Nazi League and the Rock Against Racism Club, F Club run by John Keenan (initially with Graham Cardy of the Mirror Boys) was putting on bands like Wire, XTC, The Vibrators, Severed Head and the Neck Fuckers, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs (later to be Jayne County after his operation), as well as the home grown talent of The Mekons, Gang of Four and Delta 5 – things seemed to be happening.

A few years later, 1979 to be exact, I was putting on an exhibition at Liverpool College of Art that went by the collective title of Towards Anonymity 1980 (a visual thesis proposing the removal of celebrity from the practice of art) – it was a two person show that featured the photographs of my friend, Monty Rakusen and my own series of ten pairs of shirts and trousers (montaged with images torn from magazines and cryptic letrasetted titles), that went by the title of Thesis 2 - it also had the slightly longer titles of ‘Everybody understands a shirt, but what of its’ context?’ and ‘Trousers as a metaphor for the artist and his circle’ Having established in our mission statement that there should be no delineation between music and art, and consciously ignoring lyrical rock ‘n’ roll conventions (where we chose, instead, to write diatribes about contemporary art debate), it seemed only logical that Household Name should play at the opening of the show.

At the time, we didn’t have a bass player, so we adopted Jacqui Callis from the newly formed, Another Colour*, which also included John Hyatt (later to be in The Three Johns) - and on John’s 21st birthday, both bands headed off to Liverpool in a transit (picking up a PA from The Yachts along the way) to play our first respective gigs to an audience of two in the middle of the exhibition.

facing page: Household Name 12” Single this page : Thesis 2

*without any intention, I was responsible for the name, Another Colour - we were at F Club when it was based downstairs in Brannigans, possibly watching The Thompson Twins (in the days before they had streamlined themselves into a chart-topping trio), and Ricky, as he was known then, said ‘We’re going to form a band and we’re going to call ourselves Red Indian’, to which I replied ‘Why not another colour?’ (Indian, that is) - and that was it, an off-the-cuff unintentionally misquoted retort, immortalised forever.

Along with MRA, we all became the poor relations to the now-established trio - The Mekons had recently secured a deal with Virgin, Delta 5 had released ‘Mind your own Business’ on Rough Trade, and Gang of Four were about to leave home to be elevated to a slightly higher echelon. In essence, Household Name were both earnest and contrived, and although we would never admit it at the time, we were still very wet behind the ears. There was an inherent compunction to break the rules, but we didn’t realise that we had to have learnt them in the first place before we could break them. However, we did release a self-financed 12” single (that we were still paying off long after the band had split up), and John Peel did play it on his show, concluding its’ airing with his legendary endorsement ‘Go Household Name, Go’, we supported The Clash at Leeds University, we played at the second Futurama Festival at the Queens Hall in Leeds (an old bus shelter that by the next morning was full of puddles caused by the condensation of sweat that had dripped from the roof), and got a rave review in NME from a show we played at the ICA (sharing a page with Nick Cave from his Birthday Party days) that described us as stark atonal post punk. facing page: Household Name below: Household Name on the back of a lorry. Anti-Nazi League March. The Specials headlining in Potternewton Park. 1981

After a while we became aware of a strong pungent smell, and realised that we’d been up our own arses way too long, so we decided to play some proper songs, enlist at least one proper musician and form a sort of, surreal, tongue-in-cheek cabaret band, slightly modelled on the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

Johnny Jumps the Bandwagon came into being because Gary Cavanagh from the 1in12 Club in Bradford asked us to play a benefit gig for the striking workers at Hindles Gears. So we did just that - featuring Paul Staniforth, Dave Lee and Alan Wilkinson who had all played in Household Name, we swelled the ranks with Jon Langford and Mick McSween on guitars, and cobbled together a set of cover songs which went on to include such diverse classics as, Psychotic Reaction, Dolly Parton’s Potential New Boyfriend, Meet Jacqueline by The Troggs and, of course, the epically stupid Purple Rain - which always concluded our set.

This was 1984, the year of the Miners Strike, and like many other bands with leftist tendencies of that period, benefit gigs became our staple diet - which, sort of, established a lifetime of not getting paid for playing gigs. Apart from the original Household Name members, the line-up continued to ebb and flow - reaching an all-time high of about eighteen at our final gig downstairs at The Astoria on New Years Eve 1987. As the band developed, we found ourselves playing way too much country music for our own good, our stage had become invaded by larger than life cut-out cacti, cattle skulls and a giant fish head (thrown in for a bit of good absurdist measure) - and the raw surrealist edge that we started off with, had begun to blur into mediocrity - so we decided to knock it on the head to form The Yahoo Family and return to self-penned numbers (this time in an urban country blues idiom).

this page: Johnny Jumps the Bandwagon at The Central . Dave Lee . Doc Baker . Judge P Staniforth facing page: Miners Benefit Poster . Left to Right . Mark Creswell . Jon Langford . Judge P Staniforth . Doc Baker . Mick McSween . Rico Bell

We decided to do away with a drum kit, so instead, to keep some kind of back beat, Dave Lee moved from the back of the stage to the front - still retaining his bass drum, which he played stood up, accompanied by an electric blue Rickenbacker guitar that he seemed to have on permanent loan, in addition to doing the vocals on some of his bar room classics such as ‘Far From Sober’ (I’m far from sober and I’m still in love with you / our romance is over and there’s nothing I can do). Dave eventually buggered off to Kiev, along with Claire who moved to Scotland and Mhic to Belgium - so Paul and I formed

Loved Ones and joined forces with Rico Bell (who’d played in both Johnny Jumps and The Yahoo Family at various points, and was now exchanging his accordion for an electric guitar) and Phil Stanways, also on guitar, who, along with me totalled three guitarists, one bass guitar and an ever-changing drummer. Once described as playing melodic, angst-ridden rock in a review of our gig at the Heinekin Festival in Roundhay Park (where we were technically second on the bill to The Stranglers - albeit on the small stage), I grew my hair and pretended to rock out with an acoustic guitar.

this page: Yahoo Family Left to Right . Country Dave Lee . Tony Baker . Paul Staniforth . Wanda Downtown . Fiona McMillan . Mhic McGlashan . Rico Bell

facing page: Loved Ones . Top Tony Baker . Bottom Paul Staniforth

Paul had been suffering from Motor Neurone Disease for about ten years at this point (the normal prognosis being about six months), and by 1996, could no longer play the bass, his hands being locked in too many spasms - so we decided to jack in playing live stuff. I’d played with Paul for about eighteen years, and saw no point in playing with anyone else - so we started recording instead.

We’d applied for an A4E, Arts Council Grant and had received a £5,000 award with which, amongst other things, we bought an early portable digital recording studio and called ourselves Dream Stealers. Our first project was Art Karaoke, an audio-visual album whereby we invited artists to contribute sound and video pieces, based on seven words that we referred to as lyrical metaphors, to create a fifty minute long abstract video with an accompanying soundtrack (that we mixed and edited together). Had the technology existed, we would have produced an interactive video where all of the component tracks and layers could be mixed by whoever was watching it - but that was the story of our life - we were born to soon.

It took Jacqui Callis’ young son Eddie to succinctly articulate what we’d created, namely a moving painting, and out of this came the idea to take stills from the video and turn what we had into a series of static images that we slightly enhanced on the computer to produce limited edition giclee prints.

We worked out that, with every second of video being made up of twenty five frames, and with the video being about fifty minutes long, we potentially had about seventy five thousand prints, which was going to make us millionaires - we ended up producing about twenty five before starting our next project, Loop 03, a collection of abstract musical recordings constructed out of looped sounds taken from samples and sound effects. facing page: First public screening of Art Karaoke . Evolution . Leeds 1999 this page: Reflection #1 from a series of giclee prints taken from the Art Karaoke video

Alongside the work I was still creating with Paul, The Art Cowboys came into being, to say they were formed would be a bit of an overstatement - made up of staff from the art department in which I work, the band plays in a ridiculously ad hoc manner, the line-up comprises of whoever’s around at the time, sometimes we don’t play for a couple of years and it’s rare that we ever get time for more than one rehearsal - we also, as a matter of principle, never get paid for a gig.

Squeezed in somewhere amongst all this, is The Jack Shites, a two piece band comprising of me and my son Jack (on drums) hence the name of the band ‘he’s called Jack and I’m shite’. The band is an unintentional tribute to my childhood combo, The Two Fits and has two songs to its name - ‘Johnny Cash’ (I was listening to San Quentin / Johnny spoke to me / he said a man can tell the truth / and a man can still be free) and ‘State I’m In’ (Well I’ve been drinking / in Birmingham / and every single stinking city / across this goddam land) - maybe one day I’ll write another.

Paul died in 2007 .

The album Between Truth and Lies is dedicated to him,

facing page: The Art Cowboys photo: Ricky Adam this page: The Jack Shites Left : The Brudenell Social Club Right : still from Johnny Cash video

the songs

remote control tv midnight road (long way down) lovin’ man dead man singing it’s your house let me in dallas : set them free devil’s river river of love johnny wrong lost your lovin’ heart of mine salvation road

youth club disco : remote control tv I could go out with you for one million years Hold your hand and wipe away your tears Love you baby with your big brown eyes, and I said Ooooh, you took me by surprise I don’t care what they do to me ‘cause I’ve got you and my remote control TV Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar Mark Creswell : highlife guitar / bass / drums / penny whistle / accordion / backing vocals Leon Johnson : saxophone Desmond Waters : voice Lee Dorsey . Get out my life : record scratches

this page: illustration for Remote Control TV

I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly a fan, but I do like Bob Dylan, he’s been lurking around my rock’n’roll landscape since Blowing in the Wind, in fact, one of the first songs that I ever learnt was The Times They are a-Changing. And, although numbers like Subterranean Homesick Blues, Forever Young and Highway 61 Revisited regularly pop up in my playlist - songs, that is, of great import - I particularly love his inanely stupid ones like Wiggle Wiggle and Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum. I guess this is because, what attracts me so much to rock’n’roll is it’s simplicity - namely it’s ability to communicate something with a couple of chords and some disjointed lyrics, that so effortlessly conveys sentiment and ideas in a way that other written forms tend to struggle. And this means of suggesting something without actually saying it, somehow makes it all the more articulate, in an inarticulate sort of way - like a drunken conversation constructed out of half finished sentences whose implications are corroborated by gesticulations and unbridled passion, all of which seems to make complete sense at the time - yet in the cold light of day appears to lack any substance whatsoever. None of this, however, can take away from the fact that a song, through its economy of words, often gets closer to the truth than any of its literary counterparts. facing page: Bob Dylan . Brian Jones this page: Sketch for Remote Control TV Advert for 50s television Desmond Walters

For example, As Time Goes By, written by a very young Jagger and Richard, is able to create a piece of great eloquence and beauty through a simple act of economy, that a more complex construct would only clutter and confuse. Essentially a set of bullet points, created from observation sensitively mixed with invention, they distil the whole of a persons life into one fleeting scene, viewed through the eyes of somebody in the autumn of their years. It’s repetitive, it’s ambiguous, yet somehow it says everything.

It is the evening of the day I sit and watch the children play Smiling faces I can see But not for me I sit and watch As tears go by My riches can’t buy everything I want to hear the children sing All I hear is the sound Of rain falling on the ground I sit and watch As tears go by It is the evening of the day I sit and watch the children play Doin things I used to do They think are new I sit and watch As tears go by

this page: Keith Richards & Mick Jagger

To illustrate this further, there used to be an introverted and troubled teenage girl, back in the early eighties, who would occasionally frequent the designers house where I used to work. She wrote poetry, and would turn up unannounced to share these emotional outpourings with us, ultimately hoping for some sort of cathartic response. However, she would usually have to satisfy herself with polite smiles, and the occasional “very good, have you thought about tweaking the cadence a little bit here, and holding back on your metaphors over there”. She was also a big Jethro Tull fan, and had written a very long letter, enclosed with copies of her poems to Ian Anderson asking for his advise and opinion on her work. He wrote back with a very polite letter, where he talked about his world as he knew it - being at home with nature on the Isle of Skye, his family, the joys of photography and his allconsuming fish farms - avoiding the subject of poetry until the last paragraph, where he finally had to admit that he didn’t feel qualified enough to give much advice, as he didn’t really know anything about it. For him, the only poetry that he understood was ‘being on stage singing, where words become intrinsically mixed with the sweat of performance’ And that’s what rock’n’roll is all about really, on a literary level it is crude and simplistic - even on a musical level, sophistication is not exactly high on the agenda. It’s certainly not intellectual and it’s definitely not academic. In fact, I think I can confidently say that most of my favourite songs go out of their way to avoid trying to be clever - that’s probably why I don’t like jazz, and why I stopped listening to Prog Rock once I’d turned eighteen.

It’s also where, somewhere in the middle of all this, wearing short trousers and happily playing in the mud you can find Remote Control TV. Right from the start it was a completely throwaway song, pared down to the bare minimum requirements of one verse and a chorus. The words are stupid and have little meaning, other than to tell the story of somebody who has become obsessed with a woman on the television. It’s also nostalgic - and in that respect slightly autobiographical, I guess.

Initially the song started out as an acoustic reggae tune, but then Mark added his highlife guitar, instantly making it sound like a

piece of South African Street Jive, which I’ve always loved.

Having created this different sound, it seemed only logical to add a penny whistle, and then, to bring it back to its Youth Club reggae roots, Leon put down his horn section tribute to one of my favourite reggae tunes, Return of Django - and all of a sudden Bob became your uncle.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found something deeply reassuring about hearing a stylus plunge into the grooves at the start of a piece of scratched vinyl - it’s a bit like when the lights go down in a theatre, and there’s that calming pause between the audience ceasing their chatter and the start of the performance - so, to give it that little touch of authenticity, we also recorded the scratches off the beginning of Get out of my Life Woman

by Lee Dorsey. And with the addition of the fatherly voice of Desmond Walters commanding his son upstairs to ‘turn the TV down’ (like my dad used to when I was listening to Band of Gypsies at full volume in my bedroom) - there you have it two minutes of innocence that says absolutely nothing, yet also says it all (so long as you were there at the time).

that swiss taxi: midnight road long way down The dogs are howling, the insects are biting me Neon lights flashing, your kisses exciting me (I’ve) Got some whiskey going through my veins, and it’s Too late to catch the midnight train The air is heavy, the cop cars are buzzin’ Streetside hustlers are spittin’ and cussin It’s a long way down the Midnight Road And it’s a long way down Long way down Long way down Long way down, and it’s a Long way down I wear the perfume of cigarettes and liquor T Shirt couples argue and bicker Hispanic beauties in cocktail dresses Greased-back pimps chewing on matches Fresh cut limes in Mexican urinals Shop door bums sleepin’ under the finals It’s a long way down the Midnight Road And it’s a long way down Long way down etc

‘Hey baby, hey honey, what you doin’, goin’ spendin’ all my money’ ‘I’m doin fine, I walk the line, you want me to sign on the dotted line’ Jamaican yardies in caps and bandanas Rednecked guards with security cameras White boy in bling impressin’ his girlfriend Thinks he’s a rapper, when will this road end?

The day is dawning, the sun is breakin’ My eyes are tired and my legs are aching It’s a long way down the Midnight Road And it’s a long way down Long way down etc

Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar / street sounds Mark Creswell : bass / drums / piano / samples / percussion Leon Johnson : saxophone Shara Meek : backing vocals

I wrote the beginning of Midnight Road when we were housesitting for some friends who live in a village just south of Bristol. It was hot and sticky that evening, and filtering through the muggy haze, I could hear a dog howling somewhere in the distance, as the insects that had been hovering in the local vicinity finally made up their minds to start feasting on my vulnerable flesh and then, just as I was about to squat a particularly persistent mosquito against the side of my neck, fact suddenly decided to stop what it was doing and answer the doorbell to let fiction in along with her ever-resourceful mother of invention.

Although the details are pure fabrication and the terrain appears to generate from somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, I’ve walked down this same road on many occasions - setting off, homeward bound, passing a tableau of Edward Hopper paintings, bright lights and personal dramas comprised of tetesterone-fuelled fights between drunken lads (aimed at impressing their girlfriends), stumbling revellers falling out of takeaways (who after spilling the contents of their donner kebabs onto the pavement proceed to empty the contents of their stomach in somebody’s doorway), passed parties of sour-faced girls wearing angels wings and sequinned dresses out on a hen night, who throw a V sign at a future groom handcuffed to a lamp post by his friends, with a makeshift notice hung around his neck bearing the message ‘honk if you want a bonk’ - and, like the road ahead of me, the list goes on.

My first major experience of this was after going to see David Bowie at the Empire Pool, Wembley on his Station to Station tour.

Alan Selka had dropped me off somewhere around Park Lane so that I could catch a tube to Battersea, where I was staying with my friend Marcus in his Halls of Residence. When I walked down the stairs to the platform, the gates were shut, so I was left with no option but to resort to Plan B (even though I didn’t actually have one) and catch a bus. After waiting for what seemed like three hours, but was probably more like fifteen minutes, I gave up waiting and decided to walk it. I’d caught the bus a few times before with Marcus, so I felt pretty confident that I knew where I was going - so long as I could get to Marble Arch (which, as luck would have it, was signposted just down the road), then

this page: illustration for Midnight Road this page: rough sketches for Midnight Road illustration. Originally I intended to have arrows pointing out the various scenes in the song - but it didn’t work, so I added a taxi

I’d be able to find my way home. However, although I didn’t realise it at the time, my plan was deeply flawed - what I had always assumed to be Marble Arch, was, in fact, Wellington Arch - so when I arrived at the real Marble Arch, Grosvener Place (the road I needed to take to reach my destination) had completely disappeared. I was both drunk and perplexed - which is not always a good combination.

This was 1976, only a couple of years shy of forty years ago, and over this period, I seem to have lost the finer details of what transpired that night (they’re probably in a box, somewhere in the attic), but somehow I had the good fortune to turn back on myself and find the arch I was looking for - and, along with it, my way home. This took in a couple of embassies, along the way, with their distinct lack of anything resembling night life, Sloane Square (lightly peppered with Kings Road refugees heading back to mummy and daddy’s house after a night out in a cacophonous wine bar with Justin and Henry), a brisk stroll across Chelsea Bridge, before the home stretch passing blocks of flats with the ever-imposing Battersea Power Station in the background - to finally arrive at Marcus’ flat where we listened to Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure (and probably some Elton John, because he was somewhat obsessed with the pudgy faced troubador*) before taking the mattress off his bed so that I could sleep on the revealed wire mesh in my trusty green nylon sleeping bag.

And that’s what the song is all about really - the familiar territory of walking home after a night out - and to reproduce this musically, we set out create the atmosphere of a hot clammy evening with street sounds and wailing saxophone, weaving in and out of different styles, emulating a city of clubs and bars, with Jerry Lee Lewis piano stumbling upon a Tijuana horn section, Latin American percussion doing battle with swamp boogie guitars, and a voice of asphalt and gravel narrating the whole story.

That Swiss Taxi is a reference to a school trip that Paul went on to Switzerland, where the telecabs went by the name of Funk - being partial to a bit of Parliament and Funkadellic, Paul had always wanted to call a band The Funk Taxis

* personally I can take him or leave him - usually the latter

facing page: a greased back pimp chewin on a match

voodoo tv: lovin’ man I wanna be your lovin' baby I wanna be your man This waitin' is too frustration' I just can't stand, the way you tease me with your bedroom eyes you leave me sweatin' I'm hypnotised I wanna live I wanna die I wanna scream I wanna love all that I can Oooooh oooooh I wanna be your lovin' man I'm gonna be your hoochie coochie wear your voodoo crown I'm gonna make you, I'm gonna shake you all over town You drive me crazy my heart's on fire This kind of lovin' sends me higher and higher I wanna fry I wanna burn I wanna fly I wanna dream all that I can Oooooh oooooh I wanna be your lovin' man

Gonna love you baby Gonna make you mine Just give the green light honey, give me a sign I'll turn the lights down I'll pull the blinds and Oooooh oooooh oooooh Girl, your lovin's drivin' me to drinkin Pour another shot Give me some of your sweetest nectar From your honey pot I'm gonna squeeze I'm gonna tease I'm gonna wham, bam, thank you mam Oooooh oooooh I'm gonna be your lovin' man Oooooh oooooh I wanna be your lovin' man Oooooh oooooh I wanna be your lovin' man

Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums Leon Johnson : saxophone Shara Meek : backing vocals

this page: illustration for Lovin’ Man

John Lennon was never one to have any qualms about appropriating guitar riffs from semi- obscure Rhythm and Blues artists and making them his own, so when I found myself singing ' I wanna be your lovin' baby, I wanna be your man' , I thought, 'what the hell - if it’s good enough for him, then it’s good enough for me'.

In fact, Lovin' Man wasn't content with trying to rip-off the lyrics of just one measly pop song, it had set it's sights on pilfering a whole collection of blues-type innuendos in it's quest to capture just a little bit of that essence of rock'n'roll, in its most rawest of forms - it's crude and it's simplistic, and it's certainly not politically correct, but then politics never have been, I guess.

Back in the day, Johnny Jumps the Bandwagon used to play a cover version of Commander Cody's What's the Matter Now in amongst its lyrics was the line 'I want some honey from your honeycomb, tell me what's the matter now', at the time, being in the midst of the PC revolution, this was considered in certain quarters to be outside of acceptable usage, so we ended up changing it to 'won't you tell me when you're coming home'. Although I regularly change the lyrics to other people's songs, this is usually because either I've never really listened to the words in full before (along with a few other people, I seriously believed that the words to The Israelites were 'My ears are alive'), or because it makes it easier for me to remember them - or sometimes it's because, just to spite me, the wrong words come out - but I'd never done it for political reasons before.

But hey ho, this was the nineteen eighties - commonly accepted as an embarrassing time in terms of certain musical genres, but in political terms highly polemic, to say the least. Underlying everything, there was the inescapable presence of Margaret Thatcher exerting her power over everything that stood in her way - the miners had struck, and you could still hear the toll of its bell reverberating through working class communities up and down the country - the police as a result were in need of a huge PR makeover - the Feminist movement, especially in Leeds, was reclaiming the night, along with other women's rights, and were also protesting in peace camps outside nuclear missile

bases such as Greenham Common and Menwith Hill - there was also an AIDS epidemic sweeping the niche communities of homosexuals and heroin users, forcing the western world to consider safe sex in a more positive manner - meanwhile, Bob Geldof had temporarily embarrassed the government by doing something about the famine in Ethiopia when he asked the nation to 'give me your fucking money and give it right now' (or something to that effect) - and at long last, racial and sexual equalities were starting to find their way into actual policies.

People were generally taking to the streets, and it seemed that the rights that had been fought for, for so many years were now starting to bear fruit - but all this came with a bit of a moral high ground that ironically countered a former repression with its own particular brand, that at times bordered on fascism.

Once, after a gig at Cosmo Club I was relentlessly lambasted for singing 'Stand by your man' by a female work colleague, on the grounds that I was a man and that I was doing more to set back the cause for Women's Rights than Tammy Wynette could ever have dreamt of - personally I

thought that a man singing in the role of a dutiful wife actually highlighted this untenable power base through the subversive medium of irony, but that didn't go down very well. I think the truth of the matter was that she didn't like Country and Western music, but didn't like to admit it.

There’s no denying that there was a serious fight going on at the time, one that needed fighting, and still does for that matter - the girl power of The Spice Girls having corrupted the serious intentions of gaining empowerment on equal terms, by playing straight into the hands of the dominant society that a previous generation of women had campaigned hard to address. But, like the honey from the honeycomb, sexual innuendo, although potentially divisive, is not necessarily sexist - and that, by focussing on the small details, this can sometimes distort the whole picture and actually distract from the original cause - so, maybe because of this, the honey double entendre has found itself creeping back into my lyrical repertoire. And, as Den Dennis, the Nigel Planer character in Comic Strip’s Bad News Tour, once said, ‘What’s wrong with being sexy?’

When it came to illustrating the song, I'd asked Tony Tomlin to do the honours, partly because I wanted as much variety as possible, but also because I couldn't think of what to do - I'd toyed with the idea of emulating the photo of Elvez (the gay Mexican Elvis) kissing himself in front of the mirror, but it seemed a bit too serious and narcissistic for my liking, so I gave up.

Now, Tony is an artist in the true sense of the word, he lives and breathes art. He’s also a devout Christian who occasionally errs (something he’s not happy with) - and, along with nineteen seventies Chapeltown, semantic playfulness and his mental health issues, this regularly features in his work. He is, after all, a man of habit who regularly revisits the same stomping ground, both physically (which he does on a daily basis in his circular trail across Leeds) as well as in his art - God’s 70’s Hair Hairdresser, Feel-ing Ladies Posterias at The Precinct, The Incident at the Bathes . He also has a remarkable wardrobe amassed from regular trips to the Charity Shop, which he combines in a manner that only he can - a Hawaiian shirt knotted by its tails

facing page : Women’s Liberation Movement

over track suit trousers with a pair of shorts on top, and if it’s cold, then maybe the addition of a cricket jersey - something he will refer to, with a belch of laughter, as his ‘art look’.

Tony’s genius lies in being outside of convention, although this is something he feels compelled to follow. Always seeking approval, and calling people ‘Boss’ he is convinced that everybody surrounding him must be ‘intelligent’ and in possession of a really high IQ - these markers are important to him, and often cause him to be mentally exhausted. But, for all of his reliance on structure, he is nonetheless a free spirit - and because of this, I knew that I was going to have problems when I commissioned him to do the artwork for Lovin’ Man. It didn’t take rocket science to realise that I needed to make the brief as simple as I could, with as much scope as possible for interpretation, so I set about trying to explain what the song was all about - foolishly thinking that this would set the scene for him - so to speak. But, straight away, he refused to listen, on the grounds that it wasn’t ‘clean’. So I simplified it even further, ‘As long as it’s in a portrait format and it’s got the words Lovin’ Man’ somewhere in the picture, you can do what you want with it’ I said, giving him his ten pound commission fee - and said no more. When he returned later that day with my picture, I was really pleased with what he’d done (and told him so) - but I also had to point out that, although he’d stuck to the portrait format, he’d somehow omitted to include the title of the song - the only other requirement of the brief. He laughed.

Tony Tomlin: facing page : Misour Tomlin above : Tony Thine Hart

It was obvious that I’d get nowhere in asking him to do it again, and that to squeeze the words Lovin’ Man in there would just spoil the spirit of his unique aesthetic - so I left it at that, deciding to take a photograph of him holding his picture instead. When I showed him my design he got incredibly upset over the name of the band, Voodoo TV, being on the same page as him and his image, ‘No, no, no - it’s not right’ he said, and proceeded to go into a silent sulk, for what seemed like forever, looking down at the floor with his hands between his legs - I decided not to show it him again.

the drones club: dead man singing Heard a dead man singing the same old song (He) stands before me goes on and on Take me with you Wherever you go Words seem important now There’s something you should know You never went to Woodstock, but you’ve seen the film You live alone in the city of dreams, and you’ve got time to kill You held the world in the palm of your hands now you’re too scared to walk alone Said hello with the pain in your soul and your words turn to stone Take me with you Baker / Crewswell / Staniforth Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums

this page : illustration for Dead Man Singing

All art, and every other human contrivance for that matter, has something to do with immortality, it’s why people do it - to preserve something of themselves forever - a legacy for subsequent generations, no matter how small - and, unless your name’s Dorian Grey, it’s the only option available, short of cryogenics to secure yourself a place in this desired future.

In nineteen ninety four, I was staying with Jeremy, my brother-in-law in the mountains of Andalusia, and we’d taken an excursion to the beautiful hilltop town of Ronda. If you read the tourist information guide, it will tell you that it is part of a large mountainous range, but I remember it more as a towering rocky mound sticking out of a desert like a limestone sausage in a plate of bangers and mash - although, thankfully somebody must have run out of gravy that day. It was blisteringly hot, and in the midday sun, so favoured by mad dogs and Englishmen, there were no shadows to be found.

The day had been spent being hell-bent on keeping cool, between bars and other refuges from the sun. One of these solar sanctuaries was the Bullring - not the marketplace of my youth, but an age-old site of matadorial conquests oft frequented by the likes of Ernest Hemmingway and Orson Welles (there were photographs of them in the bullring’s museum to prove it). We probably spent about an hour there enjoying the benefits of the shade provided by its roof - we watched tourists performing mock bullfights, alternating between the bull and the matador (whilst taking the opportunity to pose for an armada of disposable cameras) - we pontificated on the contradiction of this somewhat beautiful edifice whose purpose was to celebrate ritualised slaughter, the sand in front of us having soaked up countless rivers of blood - and we generally took time out to chew the fat.

One of the faux bullfighters was wearing a Kurt Cobain T Shirt - a few weeks earlier the frontman of Nirvana had shocked the grunge world by topping himself - and there had been tears and all-night vigils peopled by a sea of lumberjack-shirted mourners.

It seemed that everybody had been touched, in some, way by his presence, as one after another of his schoolday friends along with rock world C-list celebrities were paraded before the world press to shed light on the roots of this troubled soul - everybody

that is except me. At the time I was clueless as to what teen spirit smelt like, let alone any of the nuances of the bands music - but I did know what he looked like, and I did know he was dead.

Seeing this larger than life-size image of his face prancing around the ring, stretched over the slightly portly torso of an American tourist, set me thinking about his resulting immortality - how by dying, he became preserved in this particular time, never to age nor change, kept alive by his records being regularly played on the radio and his image being worn by subsequent generations of fans of his music, as a statement of their own individuality - the history book written forever.

facing page : Kurt Cobain and Bull Ring at Ronda with tourists pretending to be matadors

It was the same when I watched A Town Like New Orleans the other day, a BBC programme about the Leeds music scene,that I hadn’t seen since it was first broadcast in 1981. The concluding part of the programme featured Zero Slingsby (aka Matthew Coe) busking on the streets of Leeds - familiarly animated as he gleefully recounted, in his recognisably gruff voice, the stories of his various busts for playing his saxophone in numerous northern cities, I was particularly struck by the fact that he looked so young.

Somehow, although dying of a brain tumour in his early thirties, his image, conversely bore the absence of death, whereas myself and his other contemporaries (through the inescapable ageing process), are a constant reminder of our own tenuous mortality - and it made me realise that if we weren’t alive in the first place, then we’d never be able to die.

I’m a big fan of PG Wodehouse, I just love his writing style - it’s musicality and its wit - and I particularly like Bertie Wooster. It’s his complete oafishness, that so innocently ridicules the landed gentry, and his obsessive preoccupation with himself that seems to lack any traces of vanity, that so endears me to him. It might also have something to do with my Grandfather, who died when I was of four years old, being an avid reader of his work.

When in London, Bertie will seek distraction from whatever his current calamitous escapade might be, by visiting his club, an establishment frequented by a whole bunch of public school reprobates, including in its roster are such riotous characters as Pongo Twistleton, Monty Bodkin and Tuppy Glossop. The name of this disreputable bolt hole is The Drones Club, aptly named after the male bee that does no work, who lives off the labours of others - it’s also the name of the band. facing page : Photobooth photo of Grandfather

the rimbaudheads : it’s your house

It’s your house and you do what you like Your strength comes easy in the dark of the night Your head’s on fire with the things she said And your flames burn higher in your rage today

She falls down crying and there’s blood on her face Things seem different now you forgot what she said It’s the same old story it’s goin’ to happen again Another scar to hide another wound to mend

She’s stopped breathing and you say sorry now But sorry’s not good enough you’ve got to pay somehow Hate flows through your veins like the howlin’ wind And you try to explain but this is the end

Baker / Creswell / Staniforth / Bellis / Stanway Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums Leon Johnson : saxophone Shara Meek : backing vocals

this page : illustration for It’s Your House

I’d like to believe that I don’t have an original bone in my body, but after having recently conducted some extensive research into the matter, I’ve come to realise that, sadly, this is not entirely true.

Whilst trying to formulate this little thesis of mine, I initially thought I was making good ground, having joined together a series of logical arguments into some form of cohesive structure - but like so many ruminations that take place in the head, one often forgets about one key ingredient that buggers up the entire recipe - rendering the whole postulation just one big void. And that was where I found myself last night - ideologically aground in an ocean of lies, walking through Dewsbury in conversation with Kevin O’Hare - when out of the blue, I was hit head-on by one of those eureka moments where everything falls into place - like the proverbial missing piece of a philosophical jigsaw.

At the time we were in deep discussion about the machinations of society being based upon complicity, and how by acknowledging this mutually accepted culpability, the cogs that drive it are still allowed to keep turning. And that was when it hit me - I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, because it was quite obvious when you think about it. What I came to realise was that, along with the rest of the world, nearly everything I do is based upon a falsehood, so, in order to reach any conclusion to my argument, I should give up searching for the truth and simply, embrace the lie.

Now that I was liberated from the shackles of truthy, and with a firm dialectical foundation upon which to engineer the course of my dissertation, I could now theorise away to my hearts content.

This, of course, has been the practice of scientists since time immemorial, Albert Einstein for instance formulated his Theory of Relativity, and then spent the next twenty five years proving it and nobody seemed to get upset by this - he even received a Nobel prize.

this page : Kevin O’Hare with a plate of Zeppelins . Lithuania 2010

However, to compare my treatise to the works of Einstein, would, of course, be deceiving (and maybe a tiny bit pretentious) as I only intend to spend about twenty five minutes labouring over it’s philosophical conundrum, due to having more pressing engagements - namely that I finish the washing up prior to the start of Coronation Street.

So, without further ado, I would like return to my theory of originality (or non-originality to be precise) vis-à-vis my own creative practice. It would seem that a fundamental factor required before any claim to originality can be made, would be that the ‘creative’ must have made a conscious decision regarding the purpose and content of their particular creative enterprise prior to commencement.

Otherwise, they can’t declare complete ownership of the idea, as other instrumental forces will have had to have been involved at a key, and originating part of the process.

As in my own specific practice of writing songs, ideas are mundanely inspirational, by this I mean that they are a response to an external stimuli and therefore not constructed out of any logical thought process of which I am in control of. By playing a combination of chords and rhythms that are the results of the motor responses of my hands and fingers, I sing words that come into my head and then, using this resulting intonation and arrangement of vowel sounds I construct the final lyrics - none of this is based on any conscious intellectual decision to write a song about a particular subject, or even to convey any sort of message, therefore, ipso facto, it is not the result of original thought - like half the contents of the British Museum it has been plundered from some unsuspecting individual and assimilated by that of an arrogant other.

A good illustration of this can be found in an episode from Third Rock From The Sun when Dick, the patriarch of the family of aliens, bursts into a book signing event, claiming that the author is guilty of plagiarism, and that every word in his book has been taken from another, ‘and I have the evidence here’ he proclaims, holding a book in his hand above his head ‘it’s called a Dictionary’.

Taking this argument to it’s logical conclusion would be to say that nothing is original, it is all inspired by something else, and that the creative process is simply a reactive response - a knee jerk reaction, whether this be negative or positive, to something else - in this particular case, it could be a piece of music that I’ve been listening to, or an overheard conversation. In fact, the most that I could hope to claim, would be that my work is a derivative, paying homage to the whole back catalogue of rock’n’roll - raising the question posed by the inimitable Vivian Stanshall, ‘Why can’t I be different and original like everyone else?’

However, like every accepted convention, there is an exception to the rule, and with It’s Your House, I have unknowingly written my own antithesis. facing page : Elsie Tanner and Albert Einstein

Right from the start, I had made the conscious decision to write about domestic violence (don’t ask me why - I just did) - maybe it’s because fundamentally, I have zero tolerance to violence towards women and that I wanted, in some way to address this issue, or alternatively it’s because I felt a compunction to tell a story - unfortunately I’m not equipped to give an accurate answer, as I wrote the song a long time ago. All I recall is writing it whilst at the same time watching Somebody Up There Likes Me, a film starring Paul Newman. What is important, however, is that this is the reason for my whole diatribe - that without this aberration in a career of non-originality, my argument would still hold water. It is my achilles heal, my nemesis - my didactic downfall.

And now to return finally to the truth of the matter, something I’ve been trying to avoid throughout the course of this entire academic proposal. Everything that I’ve written has of course been pure hokum - all this philosophical investigation malarkey (also the name attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s little pot boiler) being just a smokescreen to the fact that I didn’t really know what to write about in the first place, other than that the song is about domestic violence (always a jolly subject), and that it tells the story of a man with hate running through his veins who dominates his household with outbursts of violence towards his wife, followed by periods of contrition, where he forgets what she said, and who, at the end of the song, ultimately kills her in a final and fatal outburst. Apart from that, I didn’t know what to say - so feeling obliged to write a bit more - I went off on one.

Incidentally, this is the only song on the album where the vocals are from the original take

something something : let me in I’ve been waiting for the phone to ring And there are shadows knockin’ at my door Look from my window to the street below and I can’t see her anymore All my dreams came to rest on her shoulder but she’s not there Like the blind leading the blind time after time down some dark alley of my mind Take my heart, take my soul everything, have it all Let me love Let me in La la la la

Our love is stationary and every word in my dictionary can’t tell you how I feel Even though there’s no denying I can’t help but try and bring you back to me Take my heart, take my soul everything, have it all Let me love Let me in La la la la I’ve been waiting Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar / trousers Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums Rico Bell : accordian Julie Lloyd : backing vocals

this page : illustration for Let Me In

What is it that compels us to tell stories - to fashion words into some semblance of meaning, to construct our own myth - our own history? Is it what distinguishes us from other living forms, or is it merely what we do?

If you were to ask any artist why they have chosen their vocation over any of the far more lucrative careers at their disposal, they would probably draw a bit of a blank - unless, however, they felt no embarrassment in entering into the realm of pretentiousness, and were happy to issue forth with statements about needing to expose their inner tortured soul to an unsuspecting public in a grand and selfless act of magnanimity or, alternatively, that they felt compelled to fulfil the much needed role of agent-provocateur tasked with shocking the world out of its own complacency. As anybody who has read The Emperors New Clothes will know, this would be pure fallacy. It’s true that art can emotionally move people, it can introduce us to other worlds, making us see things differently - it can even impact on individual lives - but what it can’t do is make any seismic changes to the basic infrastructure of how we all collectively exist.

If you take for instance, Picasso’s Guernica - a large monochromatic panorama if ever there was one, illustrating the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War - it tells a story, it may even preach to the converted, but it didn’t stop the war. However, what did actually bring the Civil War to its knees, has probably been long forgotten, leaving the painting to still continue to pop up in coffee table publications the world over. Is this to do with the way Pablo tells them, was he a precursor to Frank Carson, who along with hordes of other stand-up comedians I find to be the complete antithesis of anything funny, or is it simply that he just told a story, albeit in the medium of paint? - I think I know where I’d put my money.

this page : The Aventures of Baron Munchausen facing page : Guernica by Pablo Picasso

The telling of stories is not, as I might lead you to believe, a frivolous act - it can, in fact, be laden with purpose. If you take parables for example, here you have a bunch of short stories brimming with moralistic messages from the all-time Christian best seller. Written at a time when the majority of the population would have been illiterate, the parable was the most effective vehicle for distributing the message - with a story, images are conjured up and dogma is personified, all of which can be easily recalled and relayed from the audiences memory bank, to be passed on to future generations. The same was true of the propaganda machine of The Third Reich - not that I’m trying to draw any parallels here, of course, regarding ideologies and suchlike, but their most effective means of fuelling the degree of patriotism, or should I say, nationalism, needed to sustain a belief in the vision of the Fuhrer, was to commission the production of a series of films such as Baron Munchausen, all of which were heavily steeped in nostalgia. These films told stories of historic acts of triumph aimed at instilling pride in the present manifestation of their nation through the deeds of its ancestors - films, which by their very nature contained the essence of its audience - their genetic make-up being written between the lines of romantic notions of an otherwise ugly and violent beast - thus justifying the obligation of the populace to go along with the fervour, that was otherwise being thrust down their throats in a far more covert manner.

A story can lull it’s audience into acceptance in a way that pure jingoism will fail, like a shopper and a pushy shop assistant, they will recognise that they are being forced down an avenue, which they’ll immediately sense they don’t want to go down. Thus said, stories alone could not have singlehandedly created the holocaust and all it brought with it, they weren’t even the main protagonist - merely sidelined to playing the cameo role of accomplice, however culpable that role might be.

It is generally accepted that a story’s function is to communicate - whether this be ideas, feelings or propaganda - but the reason that we listen to stories is because we want to belong. In fact we need to belong, otherwise life can become very complicated (writing history on your own, and all that) - and without any shared experiences, even those of an oratorical variety, we are without heritage - and consequently, the absence of these experiences, whether they be second-hand (as in the case of somebody else’s story), means we ultimately become forever exiled. The same can be said when it comes to the telling of stories,however, there is also the added factor that it gives the narrator a greater sense of self importance - by holding court, the spotlight falls on them for the duration of the story, earning them bonus points in terms of kudos, that they can cash in whenever they feel the need.

I sometimes wonder if this is why I choose to write such pointlessly conjectured ramblings like this - does it all come down to the satisfaction of an overdeveloped ego, or is it because I simply enjoy fashioning words into a construction of some kind of philosophical prose - that, once achieved, means I can get started on something new. facing page : Joseph Goebbels . Minister of Propaganda

And what about Let Me In? Although it may be a fashioner of words, the song chooses to give philosophy a wide berth - electing to content itself with the simple telling of a story. Told in three verses, it makes no statement, but, instead, paints a picture in words that implies emotion and content through soundbites of the imagined scenes from a film. Held together by the tenuous strands of music running through the song, suggestions of context and atmosphere are made that encourage the imagination of the listener to fill in the gaps, and create the impression that they have reached some kind of understanding of what it’s all about. Depending on the experiences of the listener, it may strike a chord, but otherwise it’s just a journey from A to B that throws in a selection of metaphors and similes for good measure.

So what compelled me to write the song in the first place - short of saying that it’s merely what I do - quite frankly, I haven’t a clue.

and behind the clouds, the wind: dallas . set them free Beat up in the back streets of Dallas Haunted by the southern wind Left crying in the corner of a two-roomed apartment The child breaks down and cries Just set me free, set me free Blind to the consequence of action The man raises up his hand And brings it down on the innocence of his temptation The child bears another scar Just set her free, set her free Caught up in the crossfire that evening Words, words that break the bones She cried ‘Mama, there’s been too much hurtin’ ‘It’s time, it’s time to say goodbye” Just set us free, set us free

this page : illustration for Dallas : set them free

Baker / Creswell / Staniforth Tony Baker : vocals / beard Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums Rico Bell : accordian Julie Lloyd : backing vocals I find it interesting that when you work in another art-form, you explore a subject down different avenues.

Once that I’d finished writing Salvation Road (more of that later), it occurred to me that I could write a series of short stories based on the lyrics of songs, much in the same way that Sean Penn’s film Indian Runner was based on Highway Patrolman by Bruce Springsteen. And then I thought, why not write stories based on my own lyrics – which is what you’re about to read.

She had been crying It was six o’clock – outside it was already beginning to get dark - and the window of her apartment was offering little more than a failed promise of protection against the prevailing wind.

Its cracked and pitted seal let in a flurry of turbulent gusts that played with the indigenous dust of her room, like a cat with a mouse - teasing it into swirling clouds, that, in the glow of her electric fire resembled a dime-store lava lamp.

The wind was her tormentor, it worked its way into her wounds, aggravating the memories that she tried to wipe from her mind.

Reminding her, that even in his absence, he was still there - and the wind, his ally and crony, was forever watching over her.

There were times when she didn’t know which was worse – the threats of the biting southerly or the devil that had taken up residence – whatever the case, neither would leave her in peace.

And curled up in the corner of the room, in an attempt to blank out the world, she would close her eyes - only to enter the cinema of her memories – a disturbing landscape of flickering images projected onto the impromptu screen of her closed eyelids.

And it would always be the same film showing She couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t just leave and take her with her. She hated her for that, she saw it as betrayal – a betrayal of their love. It used to be just them – they didn’t need anybody else, they had each other and that was enough. But then he came along and spoiled things – spoilt everything.

He was a brute. He drank. There was a palpable bitterness that had eaten away so much of his soul that his breath always smelled – an acrid stench that rose up from the depths of his belly and hovered around the outside of his mouth like ectoplasm. The first time she met him, she’d retched – the smell had burnt her nasal passages like ammonia, tugging at the lining of her stomach and clogging her throat. And she could hear a voice deep inside of him – faint, threatening whisperings, spoken in tongues – an evil

language of thorns and broken glass whose words ripped through her skin and clawed at her bones like a wolf with its prey.

That night she told all of this to her mother, but she wouldn’t listen – dismissing her fears as childhood jealousy. She even accused her of trying to steal her happiness.

“He’s the best thing that has ever happened to me, and you want to spoil it.” she’d said.

“He even bought you a present – he didn’t need to you know – and what did you do in return? You didn’t even say thank you.”

And in a moment of instant regret, she slapped her across the face.

“You’re an ungrateful and spiteful child.” She cried out and turned to walk away It was at that moment that her mother abandoned her She switched off the light in the living area, shutting the door to the bedroom behind her, only to return a minute later with a blanket that she dropped on the couch – and then she was gone, leaving the child alone in the dark with only a crack of light from the bedroom door and the hushed murmurs from within. Deep slow rumblings punctuated with outbursts of quickly suppressed laughter and a trickle of whispers.

In the darkness each sound was magnified, seeming to fill every corner of the room with its suggestion. And she felt scared and unable to move. Fearful of the unknown, she remained in her own silence, sat on the couch hugging her legs with her face buried in her knees – the blanket still next to her where her mother had dropped it. And closing her eyes, she tried to create a picture of the room on the other side of the door, to see if she could make sense of what was happening – but it didn’t help – if anything, it only made things worse.

She’d never slept on her own before. She’d always been able to close her eyes and drift off, wrapped in the warm cocoon of her mothers embrace - and, afloat in the magical world that her mother had contrived for her, she would wake up in the morning to find that everything was just as it always had been. But that

night she was on her own, all she could do was sit there in the vain hope that if she kept her eyes closed long enough, the film that was showing would end, and she would be able to disappear – returning to the sanctuary that was once her nocturnal home.

At first he tried to be nice to her, but she didn’t like him being nice. Being nice meant that her mother became blinded - tricked by his wafer-thin charm and cheap cologne, his carefully groomed hair with its occasional spot of dandruff and his unnaturally tanned skin. Surely she must see through him, she’d thought, it was so obvious that he was putting on a show. Could she not taste the malice lurking between the lines of his carefully rehearsed script - that he performed word-perfect through the cracked smile of somebody who didn’t mean what they said? And could she not hear that bitter, primeval verse brewing in the bowels of his temper – threats and promises more vicious than any words could say?

Being nice made her tense, it was an invasion, a violation – an attack on her personal space. She didn’t want him there, and she especially didn’t want him being nice to her.

As his presence grew, then so did her mothers fade. His dominance reducing her to whispers. She became a shadow, a servant to his whims and fancies. There was no more laughter, no spontaneous activities, no dancing, no fanciful singing. She had shrunk, withering like a flower too long in a vase, yet still forcing a smile of such transparency that it did little to conceal her despair.

And he would get louder, laying claim to every inch of the room, as though with every breath he was sucking it all in, until he would soon become the room itself – finally draining them of every last vestige of their being. And his words, although devoid of meaning, were laden with an intent that the child knew only too well – designed for his own perverse benefit and to lay fear at their very soul - with every syllable an anaesthetic numbing their spirit in a paralysis that kept them trapped in his evil game.

And he would be shouting in her mothers face, his arms outstretched, stepping back and pacing the room like a boxer, his rage inflating his body before he was back in her face again,

calling her names – criticising everything she did: she was an embarrassment, she didn’t look after herself, she was pathetic, the apartment was a hovel, she was white trash - past her sellby-date.

And then he would speak with his fists. At first they would be slaps across her face, teasing and almost playful, yet so hard that they left their imprint smarting on her cheek. And then finally, there came the punches, full blown punches to her stomach that left no marks, yet winded her so much that she fell sobbing to the floor. And, looking up at him, in a hope that he would stop, she would clutch at apologies to win his favour, but these would only fuel his anger further. He would kick at her in frenzied blows, whilst all the time he would grow bigger and bigger until all of the anger had left his body, and he would then sit down calmly, switch on the TV set and, matter-of-factly, ask her to clean up the mess before fixing him something to eat.

There were times when the child just sat crouched in the corner, rocking with her eyes closed and her hands over her ears – then there were other times when she did not.

Unlike her mother she wasn’t scared of him.

It was the words that got to her – that triggered something inside of her like the clasp of a snare. They would break through her defences, striking at her very core - and there was nothing that she could do about it. She would leap onto his back like a feral child – wild and fearless – scratching at his face, digging her teeth into his neck until she drew blood – every sinew of her body tensed as the hate flowed out of her and into him. And he would roar, twisting his body to free himself from the girl attached, leechlike to his neck – but she was locked on. Whatever he tried was useless, his arms couldn’t reach her, and any shaking couldn’t shift her. All he could do was continue to roar as he stomped about the room until gradually his pacing would start to subside, and he would sit down deflated. But still the child would remain fixed to his back as though they were one, fused together with hate as their bond – he the tranquilised lion, and she his mane.

Long after he had quietened down, she would begin to loosen her grip, and drop off him, falling totally exhausted onto the couch.

And then, as though from nowhere, the energy would flow back into him for one last surge of anger and he would turn and raise his hand, bringing it down on the child in one mighty blow that would knock her unconscious.

In the beginning, there used to always be a reconciliation.

He would nurse her mothers wounds, stroking them with such sensitivity that it was hard to believe that it was he who was their cause. He would whisper gentle words into her ear - promises, soft and beautiful, that he would never keep – working his web of lies into a tapestry that masqueraded as truth - until he was able to coax a coy smile from her lips – and then, like a young girl on a first date, she would be under his spell once more.

Sitting on the couch and snuggled in his arms she would cast a sideways glance at her daughter as if to say ‘See, I told you that everything would be OK - he didn’t really mean it’, and would then return to meet his eyes in an unconditional surrender before disappearing, once more, behind the bedroom door.

But that was in the beginning – and now it was the end In between his violent outbursts, there were periods of calm – but these were only a time of waiting, where the fear that filled expectation was often more painful than the attacks themselves.

As for him, it was as though nothing had happened. His anger was his identity, and its absence had stripped him of it. He became indifferent, choosing to either lounge around the apartment or, more often than not, leave them alone in the aftermath to spend time with his drinking buddies.

In his absences she would try to talk to her mother, to make her see some sense – but it was wasted breath. She would be desperately preparing for his return – which she believed could be at any minute, or there again, if he decided to go on a bender, could be sometime the next day. It didn’t matter how long it would be, she would work ceaselessly to try and appease him– making sure that his meal would be ready for whenever he walked

through the door, ironing his shirts, applying make-up to cover her bruises – anything to prevent any further provocation and gain his approval. But it was all futile, because whatever the rules were of his current regime, he would change them – the details of his demands meant nothing to him, it was having the power to assert them that mattered.

And then it was the night.

The door was not even locked, but still they remained caged in – behind bars invisible to the human eye, yet as real as any prison cell. It was his lingering presence – along with the everpresent wind - that held them there, with the threat of what might be resounding in their ears.

But things couldn’t get any worse – they were already living in the what-might-be.

That night had been particularly vicious, the child’s face already bore a bruise that was beginning to swell, and her mother, doubled over from a kick to her kidneys, was frantically tidying the debris of his rage. He’d been gone for two hours now, yet it seemed like the echoes of his footsteps were still ricocheting off the walls of the stairwell, clinging resolutely to the shirt-tails of his departure. And although dark outside, it was still early, and it was unlikely that he’d return until long after the bars had closed for the night - but still they remained in silence, lest any noise should cause the footsteps to return, bringing with them their master and his madness Something caught her eye – something shiny and colourful, halfhidden behind the cupboard. It was a photograph of the child and her mother, taken a year earlier – before he had come into their life. They were on Stewart Beach, the sunlight illuminating their faces – they were smiling – their happiness radiating from within.

It had been taken on their vacation where they’d stayed with her mothers sister in her house by the sea. They had never been away from home before, and the child had been in a heightened state of excitement for weeks about seeing the sea for the first time.

She had seen pictures in books, and her mother had told her how

the waves rose like giant white stallions riding out of its depths - she’d wanted to know everything, asking the same questions over and over again in case any of the details had changed since their last telling – and her mother had always obliged.

Every day had been a new experience for her and she drank it all in, treasuring every moment like the stories from the books that her mother had read to her.

Like the ocean before her, everything was a thing of magic. She imagined the grains of sand that stuck between her toes to be tiny specks of gold, collecting them in an envelope that she still kept hidden in the bottom of her clothes drawer. And when she lay in bed at night, in the tiny attic room looking up at the atlantic moon, she would lick the residue of the briny sea from her lips in the way that she did after eating chicken nuggets – savouring each morsel as though she would never eat again – and, closing her eyes, she would be back there swimming in the sea once more, rocked to and fro by its embrace.

Back in her apartment she licked her lips – it was still there - faint, yet she could still taste it. And she began to cry – uncontrollably – not because of her wounds, nor from despair or self-pity, but because she remembered that she had once been happy – and because the person in front of her, picking up the pieces of a broken ornament - collateral damage from his last tirade - had once been her mother.

“Mama?”, she hadn’t called her that in a long time.

“Mama ?” the word got half stuck in her throat, partly due to the dryness she felt, partly because of its unfamiliarity.

“Mama?’, her mother looked up.

“What’s happened?” she turned the photograph for her mother to see.

“What’s happened to us?” The pieces of the broken trinket fell to the floor, and a tear appeared in the corner of her mothers eye, suspended and hesitant, the muscles in her cheek beginning to convulse in an attempt to hold back the inevitable flood.

“What went wrong?” She handed her mother the photograph, and for a moment her mother froze, before opening her mouth in a silent wail. The tears fell, but still she remained mute, transfixed

by the photograph - motionless, except for the shudders that rippled up her torso as she took in air. And they carried on falling her mascara, that she’d only applied thirty minutes earlier, tracing the rivulets of her riven skin, like the ink on an etching plate.

And the child put her arms around her and began to comfort her It had been so long since she had been shown any affection, that at first she recoiled, tensing her shoulders in distrust of its intention. But her daughter continued to hold her close, stroking her hair and gently rocking her to a lullaby of her own invention – in a perfect reversal of mother and child.

Very slowly, her mother began to regain some form of consciousness, as though she was entering a portal into another world – to which, if the bewilderment in her eyes was to be believed, must have been a strange and alien landscape.

Bit by bit she started to reconstruct the semblance of life that she had left behind – a battered jigsaw with a few missing pieces that had been kept hidden in the back of a cupboard – forgotten and lost to a faded memory. And as she looked around her, she could see a street light framed by her window, her first landmark of the world outside – and she began to cry again. This time her wail found its voice and her breathing its rhythm.

“It’s alright, it’s going to be alright”, the child whispered, still holding her in her arms – still rocking, “But?” it was the first word that she had spoken to her daughter since the night that she’d hit her.

“It’s alright” she smiled, “I forgive you” and with that, she let her mother go.

And that was all it took The guilt that had consumed her all those months, eating away at her until she believed herself without worth nor right, was now impotent and lay before her – no longer able to poison her with its insidious lies - no longer able to reach her. And the man, the monster that she had let bring her to her knees, who had made

degradation her bed-fellow, was finally exposed - revealed to be merely the agent of her own remorse.

Her exile was over – the retribution that she had inflicted on herself was now paid in full – she was free to look outside of herself and see the details of her world for the first time: the electric fire sparkling as the dust settled on its solitary bar - the calendar still open at September, untouched since the night that she’d departed - her daughters books, worn by repeated reading, now standing neglected by the door – the carved floral plaque, a souvenir from their holiday to Galveston – and the photograph that she held in her hand. All conspiring to wake her from the nightmare that had stalked her life, for what had been nearly a year.

Between then and now, her world had changed beyond recognition – yet throughout it all, time itself had stood still – a loyal friend waiting in the wings for her return, ready to welcome her with open arms.

“But we” she protested. The child put her fingers to her lips.

“But we can’t” still standing with one foot in that other world.

“But” And taking the photograph from her mothers hand, she let it fall to the floor, and led her slowly to the door.

Outside on the street, the yellow light still burned, they heard a clatter of noise spill out of a kitchen window, two girls in party dresses passed them arm in arm, and in the distance a freight train rattled endlessly by - its cargo its own secret.

And beyond the clouds the wind lay silent and still

hush little baby: devil’s river When I was young, my mama told me ‘Don’t go to the waters edge There are demons that wait in the shadows, and they whisper words of dread.

And the Devil waits at the river, and the angels fear to tread and he carried away your sister and left her alone and dead Well I lived the life of a soldier and I fought this bloody war I’ve been face to face with my maker and death’s knocked at my door And the Devil still waits at the river and the angels fear to tread and he carried away my sister and left her alone and dead Now, revenge tastes so bitter, and his blood is on my hands and I laid him ‘neath the river on a bed of shifting sand And Devil lives within me and the angels, they have fled and my fate lies with my maker to live among the dead Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums / banjo / backing vocals

this page : illustration for Devil’s River

Nobody can say that I’ve ever been one to shy away from the dubious practice of contradictions, however I do try my best to sidestep those of a moral variety, if at all possible, as these can very easily turn around and bite you on the bum.

Having spent a little bit of time reflecting on this issue, I think that I must have recognised this contradictory tendency of mine fairly early on, when, in what must have been some deep-rooted psychological desire to qualify my position on the subject, I wrote a truck driving song called Soya Milk Cowboy which included the line ‘I’m full of contradictions - like whiskey and gasoline’.

Maybe, at the time, I thought that by coming out of the closet I had a carte blanche to practice hypocrisy without fear of slings and arrows, or any other kind of retribution for that matter. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it yourself, but it’s a brilliant strategy for disarming your dissenters - if you brazenly declare that you practice a social taboo, whether this be picking your nose in public, supporting Manchester United or coordinating mass genocide, you ultimately strike it from the moral dictionary - and if you deny it’s existence, then it’s no longer a problem. So by exposing myself as a purveyor of contradiction, I now have licence to counter anything that I’ve already said - it’s as though by this unquestionable honesty and constant reaffirmation of the fact, there is something almost honourable in what has hitherto, spat in the face of social acceptancy.

And with this precedence established, I will now unashamedly attempt to debunk all that I wrote previously about the process of originality needing to be the complete ownership of the individual artist, and set about extolling the virtues of outside forces.

Now, although it would be true to say that I’m more than familiar with spending time inside my own head, engaged in both an internal and eternal discourse about this or that, and hatching plans for one creative enterprise or another - I’ve never been one to understand the dictatorial approach to the creative process, whereby an artist’s original vision is so inflexible that they will not rest until every nuance of the original idea is fully replicated in its final realisation. This single-mindedness is scary, to say the least - I also find it a bit boring, as it’s the interaction between

contradictory forces that leads to something new - something unexpected, unplanned and ultimately unique - and this is where the magic lies.

It is also possibly the reason that I chose to opt out of the megalomaniacal school of art in the first place, as I never fully know what I’m wanting to achieve - and for me, that’s kind of what the whole adventure is all about - although, saying that, it can sometimes take me a while to adjust to any drastic changes that might challenge my original perception of an idea. A case in point being the recording of Devil’s River.

The song had always been set in a post American Civil War landscape, and written in a folk song tradition of dark forces and dead babies (I remember Jon Langford once telling me that every country artist has at least one song about a dead baby - Down From Dover is Dolly Parton’s, Devil’s River is mine). It tells the story of a young boy being warned by his mother of the dangers of going too close to the river that took his sister’s life. To add gravitas to the warning, his mother cited the devil as the perpetrator at whose hands her daughter’s life was taken, creating in the young boys eye, a fiend whose wrongdoing he must make it his life’s mission to avenge - something that consumes him into manhood until the final reckoning, eating away at every moral fibre in his body until his quest to take both an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has eradicated any remaining vestige of his former self. Yet, once slain he realises that the devil was merely the bitterness that had been festering in his soul all that time, and that now having blood on his hands he is destined to spend his eternity in purgatory.

We’re almost talking Old Testament here, and by being set in a distant past, there is a timelessness that opens the floodgates to mythology - there’s certainly no hint of the modern world tainting the story with a time context - because although there’s plenty of evil abounding in contemporary society, it is not inhabited by grotesque demons of non-human form - our monsters have had no face-to-face pact with Beelzebub himself, they are just despotians driven by the madness and abuse of power - or alternatively, they’re just plain evil bastards.

So with all these references made to a pre-industrialised archaic world, it therefore seemed that the obvious thing to do, was to set the story to an acoustic folk/blues tune - which is what I did. But then Mark got his hands on it - the tune was simplified, the guitar removed and everything was stripped bare down to just bass guitar, snare drum, vocals, some ummms and the occasional finger clicking (oh, and some banjo and trumpet towards the end) - it could have been Fever, had I not made the conscious decision many years ago to never use the word forsooth in any song I might choose to write. And although the arrangement bore no resemblance to the feel of the original tune - by becoming

almost a cover version in itself, it revealed the song in its essential form - and that’s what I like about a piece of music, that it can have a life of it’s own, that with every re-interpretation, you can hear something new.

And so, with Devil’s River, although totally radical in it’s departure from the original, it not only made complete sense, it also took it to another level, because without the intervention of another pair of ears, to me it would have been one-dimensional, I would have known everything that had gone into it’s making and because of this, it would have been lacking some of the magic - and here is where lies differentiation between science and art.

big fish little fish : river of love Take me down to the river, the river of love Wash my hands in the water cool my blood Lay me down on a bed of red hot fire Kiss me once, kiss me twice, fill me with desire

Burning up with an atom bomb fever, I’m out of control Don’t need no doctor, don’t need no medicine just your rock’n’roll You’re an angel, you’re the devil you do as you please One more time, I’m begging you I’m on my hands and knees

Move your body, to the rhythm, shake your hips Run your finger along my shoulder, touch my lips.

You’re a temptress, heaven sent to us, playing with my soul You wrap me round your little finger, I’m under your spell.

To the river the river of love

To the river the river of love

Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / mandolin / finger piano

Baker / Creswell

this page : illustration for River of Love

this page : Elvis Presleye

Let’s make no bones about it, River of Love is a song about love and desire, it even contains the words in its lyrics - so in that respect, it’s a bit of a no-brainier when it comes lyrical interpretation. And it’s not as though the subject is anything new to rock’n’roll either - with songs like Heartbreak Hotel, Chapel of Love, Why do Fools Fall in Love, littering the top twenty since time immemorial, it’s become part of the furniture - in fact I don’t think I’d be overstating the fact to suggest that it is the bedroom carpet of the entire rock’n’roll home furnishings department.

Yet back in the day of the post punk era (I think I’ve got it on my iPod, but I’ve never really listened to it - to quote Peaches Geldof), songs about the subject were totally taboo in certain circles, or to be more specific, my circle - where, merely uttering the word baby could have you arrested by the PC Police, and singing ‘I love you’, well God forbid, that would have had you being frogmarched straight to the gallows. For, at the time, every lyric had to have meaning, which meant political meaning, and because a love cliche was anything but political, it had no place in the overall scheme of things. That’s why I wrote songs like World Paranoia: reds are under the bed / out to destroy you / you’d be better off dead, Indoctrination: believe in the words of the press / they were the ones with the bricks, and Lynch Mob Tactics : kill the bastards they killed my mum - we even had a song containing the words cease collateral damage. However, swapping ideologies for people as a subject matter for emotion, does tend to take a little bit of the soul out of a song - there’s no denying that a musical rant can be dripping with passion, but in terms of engaging with a mass populace, well, a brick wall has been built before things even get started.

And anyway, rock’n’roll has always been a sexual thing, that’s why the young Elvis was so vilified - not only were his songs encouraging the younger generation to abandon the convention of their elders, his on-stage performances and his gyrating hips were tantamount to sexual enticement. And when it comes to performance, separating these two things isn’t easy, as the energy of rock’n’roll is also the bedfellow of libido.

Maybe it’s purely a matter of this association, I don’t know, but somebody once told me that I was quite sexual when I performed, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, because my on stage contortions were designed to be absurd, and in that respect, the complete antithesis of anything of a sexual nature. So, whilst I was tugging at my hair to the climactic crescendo of Purple Rain and twisting my map into a facsimile of what I believed to resemble the facial expressions that one pulls when doing the strain on the lavatory, someone else was experiencing a totally different interpretation (that is unless they had a particular bent for all things scatological).

What my intentions had failed to acknowledge in this instance, was the power of this association - added to which, is also the element of dance. Now, there is no denying that dance (which is what Elvis couldn’t help himself from doing when performing) is a sexually driven thing - even the formalised dances practiced by the likes of Jane Austen must have had some sexual allure to be so central to the courting rituals of her novels - so by its very nature, performing a song whilst at the same time moving ones body, can’t help but constitute a scene of an explicit nature.

So with all these things so inextricably linked, it’s not surprising that the subject features so often in the lyrics of rock’n’roll - writing songs about other things such as cars, rebellion and being misunderstood is all well and good, but there is not quite the same natural association as there is with sexual desire.

facing page : kitchen aprons on sale outside the Duomo at Sienna

the wrong side of the tracks: johnny wrong You made your money You sold your soul To the devil, for a pocket of gold (You’ve) been running round on the wrong side of the track where they look you in the face and they’ll stab you in the back Sheriff Carter says you killed a man, and he won’t stop until he hunts you down Hungry for a lynching the hypocrites and klan they want your blood across this land Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong They saw your hand upon the knife, and you’ve been messing with his pretty wife (You’ve) been hanging out in the house of sin and now your guilty for the colour of your skin Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong

Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong You may be wrong You may be right They took your life with a cold and bloody knife You may be right You may be wrong They took your life and they wrote it in this song Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong A rope is hanging from a tree They’re trying to steal your liberty The crowd is crying ‘He can’t be hung, just keep on running, Johnny Wrong’ Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong Oooh oooh, Johnny Wrong

Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums

When it comes to finding a reason, I can’t seem to put my finger on it, but I’ve always had this gut wrenching abhorrence of a lynching party - it might have been seeing Spencer Tracy in The Fury at an early age, or alternatively, it might just be a deep down mistrust of any kind of mass fervour.

And so it is with this song - Johnny Wrong is a black man on the run from a crime he didn’t commit, who is being hunted both by the law, represented by Sheriff Carter as well as the Ku Klux Klan.

Wanted for the murder of a wealthy landowner, with whose wife he has been having an affair, his real crime is the fact that he is a black man with money who has been living in a white man’s world, doing their dirty work for them - and for this, his former business colleagues, previously happy to have him in their society whilst it suited them, have now turned on him, in order to wash their hands of any unscrupulous dealings, setting in motion a witch hunt peopled by vigilantes, bigots and a host of other unsavoury characters.

It’s a song about hypocrisy, duplicity, racism in the Deep South and a flamboyant, yet flawed folk hero. Because, let it be said, Johnny is no angel.

In order to become a self-made man, he has, in effect, sold his soul to the devil, doing whatever he can to build his fortune and become an equal of those pillars of society with whom he has been fraternising. Yet, although guilty of many things, he is nonetheless a hero of the people - like them he was brought into a world of no inherited prospects, and in spite of this, he still became a man of substance - like the outlaws of his past and future, he is a champion of the common people.

But this is a time of neither equality nor justice, and certainly not when at the hands of a lawman in the employ of corrupt profiteers and members of the Klan. For all the support of the people, things are stacked against him.

There is an anonymous photograph that I first saw in Alistair Cooke’s America that shows a lynching of two black men. Now, you would think that the lynching itself would be shocking enough,

facing page : Anonymous lynching Poster for THe Fury this page : illustration for Johnny Wrong

with the strange fruit of Billie Holliday’s classic song, blowing in the Southern Wind, and all that - but what I find most horrifying is that the crowd below appear to be celebrating the hanging as if they were at a summer fair. These are the good folk, they are you and me - a man is caught smiling in the camera’s flash, another is pointing at one of the bodies (just in case the photographer had missed the main attraction), entire families have turned out in their finery, car headlights surround the perimeter illuminating the whole event and in the foreground is a young woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to my mother in her late teens looking slightly nervous, yet, all the same, joining in the celebration along with everybody else. And it’s this hypocrisy that so offends me, that what purports to be a civilised community made up of bankers, shopkeepers and good Christian people can condone such savagery and still go about it’s daily business. It’s the same double standard of society that, in order to preserve it’s authority, grants immunity to its membership whilst purging anybody who exists on the outside - by creating an enemy, this purifies the common cause, and justifies a means to an end.

The anonymity of the image, the photographer unknown, suggests that this could be a regular event in the town’s calendar - it also leaves the identity of the two men hovering above the crowd unrecorded. These were both somebody’s son, they could have been a husband, a father and a brother - yet they had been dragged through the mud, their clothes reduced to rags, they had been beaten and killed, and for what purpose - to become an unknown corpse immortalised in an undocumented photograph.

This stripping of identity is the crime, like the victims of the concentration camps wrenched from all semblance of their former lives, their heads shaved, their clothes replaced with shapeless stripes, it leaves these two men to suffer the ultimate degradation.

Because of this, I once wrote a song called Klansman, partly to draw parallels between the atrocities of both the Ku Klux Klan (named after the sound made when loading a rifle), Nazi Germany, Apartheid in South Africa and the warmongering of Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan - but also to give a name, albeit fictional, to one of the men - in a poetic attempt to restore a sense of dignity to an otherwise undignified death.

‘There’s a rope round the neck of John Spencer, as his body it hangs from that tree, and there’s blood on the hands of the klansmen, and the people who put him to sleep’ - the song then travels over to Soweto via the Civil Rights marches and finally to the present day, only to keep returning to the voice of John Spencer in the chorus as he screams ‘and you won’t find forgiveness, ‘cause you never told the truth, there’s a rope waiting somewhere, and it’s waiting there for you’ Johnny Wrong kept on running, eluding both the Sheriff and the Klan, but this was the fate that awaited him - haunting him for the rest of his life.

And, although he was never caught, his liberty was forever denied him.

barefoot servants too: lost your lovin’ Lost your loving when I was just a boy a hundred years ago – or so the story goes And it’s written on the back of my hand And it keeps me loving you And I saw you in a faded photograph throwing me into the sea – just you and me We were laughing but our eyes never met And it keeps me loving you Oh And then you let me in The day before you died – still I want to cry And I’m holding back the feelings That we shared And it keeps me loving you Baker / Creswell / Staniforth Tony Baker : vocals Mark Creswell : guitar / tres / bass / accordian

this page : illustration for Lost Your Lovin’

I bought John Steinbecks East of Eden at a Jewish Bazaar in Leeds Town Hall sometime in 1976. It was a cheap Pan paperback with a crudely painted front cover – a figure standing menacingly in a doorway was silhouetted by slabs of palette knifed light stabbing at the darkness of the room, etching out the form of a crouching figure in the foreground – an image more akin to a pulp fiction novel than a serious piece of literature. It had been read before, in the bath it seemed, its pages fanned out like an overweight peacock, having been thumbed many times by its previous reader. It was a thick book and has remained unread ever since I bought it – I’ve never worked out whether this was due to its size or the painting on the cover.

But I did see the film, an afternoon double-bill of James Dean movies at the ABC cinema, and I cried when the prodigal son tried to buy his fathers love back. A love denied by pride and principle.

A love lost through the prodigality of youth and the deep-rooted conventions of adulthood. I cried because I was a son, I also cried because I knew that one-day I might become a father.

I had never considered my father or our relationship before. He was the man who slept for an hour every dinnertime (his forty winks), he was the man who drove around the Black Country two days a week delivering lampshades, he was the man who coughed, who had no sense of smell and who was ill for most of our life together. He had been other things, but these had been traded in to become a husband, a father, a shopkeeper. He didn’t talk much about his past, or maybe I just didn’t ask. I knew that he lived on Brighton Road in Balsall Heath and that his father was a coal-man. He had won a scholarship to Aston Commercial School and he saw this as a ticket to another world, to bigger and better things. For a hobby he did carpentry (a skill that never left him), he performed in various amateur theatrical revues, he painted, he did his own photography, he was a commissioned lieutenant during the 2nd World War, he learnt to swim twice (the second time in Rimini) and he played the Hawaiian Guitar. Apart from pen and ink drawings and a couple of photograph albums I never saw any evidence of his past, he’d changed his name from Alfred to John (his middle name) when he was in the army and had waved goodbye to his former life.

this page : That scene from East of Eden

The week before he died, I went to visit him and my mother. As well as the bronchial asthma that had plagued him as long as I could remember, he had now developed cancer. He still had all his faculties but was weak from medication and the burden of illness. Unable to cope with most of his own needs, my mother had been caring for him as best as she could – feeding him, making him comfortable - waiting. One morning she asked me if I would bathe him. I was thrown into a silent panic. I’d never really experienced closeness with my father (that was my mothers department), we’d never really touched since I was a young child, even his lecture on the Facts of Life consisted of ‘I guess you know all about this from school. Have you got any questions?’ I’d gone to the pub with him on a few occasions to mark my passage into manhood, but I didn’t really understand what it was all about, a conversation constructed out of questions and answers, unable to share the things that interested us – I was a middle class boy who was slowly becoming a socialist and he was once a working class man who for many years had been voting Tory and who spat venomous tirades at the television every time Harold Wilson appeared.

And here I was being asked to bathe him like he could have done for me when I was a baby (if he’d gone in for that sort of thing). He appeared to embrace this reversal of roles, maybe seeing in it a natural symmetry, the conclusion of a cycle – womb to tomb and all that. Sat naked on a bench across the bath, he was poised with dignity; his skin that once stretched tautly over his fat body now sagged like a deflated balloon. He started to talk and I tentatively started to wash him. He said ‘Shit’, he said ‘Fuck’ – apart from calling other drivers ‘stupid arses’ (he always maintained that he said ‘asses’) and uttering the occasional ‘bloody hell’ when he hit his thumb with a hammer, I’d never heard him swear before. I was becoming aware that he was stripping away the rules that had previously governed his life.

It was his whole being that was naked, he was himself and this was his soul, which he was sharing with me. As the soap and flannel reached lower, he told me about when he was in the army stationed in Italy. As part of a health education programme, and to occupy the troops during manoeuvres, a doctor was asked to address the batallion on the subject of sexually transmitted

diseases. Mortified at the idea of talking to a large audience, let alone on the subject of syphilis and gonorrhoea, the doctor stuttered and coughed, finally launching into a long and enthusiastic talk on feet and how to care for them. My father had listened to this lecture many times, he never got to learn about venereal disease but he made it his lifes mission to care for his feet.

And then I was washing his genitals, my hand touching his sex, the very thing that had created me. We were both silent, aware that words were no longer important, humble, knowing that we had shared something that made up for all that we had missed.

Over the next week he visited many places, he had been to Mission Control at Houston, he had talked with Winston Churchill – he had let go of the reality that had been his life, he had let me in and now he was gone.

I never consciously grieved for my father, his memory is my grief. this page : Harold Wilson facing page : My Dad and Me at Tenby

gridley quayle: heart of mine Love is cruel and unkind and I’m foolish and I’m blind Dream, my solitude There is nothing I can do - to stop loving you Winds of time, our lips embrace Sunlight smiles upon your face Intoxicates my soul In my arms I long to hold - our love enfolds Please don’t break this heart of mine Please don’t break this heart of mine Please don’t break this heart of mine (The) sky is black and that is why I sit at home and cry (You) took my love and let it die Your heart has found an alibi - a love denied Please don’t break this heart of mine Please don’t break this heart of mine Please don’t break this heart of mine of mine of mine Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals Mark Creswell : guitar / bass / drums / keyboards / backing vocals Matt Bourne : cello

this page : Illustration for Heart of Mine

I finished writing Heart of Mine whilst driving across Ireland with Ken Reid, in what, if I recall correctly, was a red Ford Focus that we’d hired from Dan Dooley Car Rentals - not because they were highly recommended and reliable, but because we loved the name.

We were on a mission to check out locations and accommodation for some student films that we were going to produce, and we were heading off to Kinvara in County Galway on the other side of the country. On entering the car, Ken declared that he couldn’t read the map, because it would make him sick for many days afterwards, and I discovered as soon as we hit the motorway that I couldn’t read the road signs - not because they were written in Gaelic, but because my eyes had suddenly discovered that they needed glasses in order to function properly - which posed what should have been a bit of a navigational nightmare however, in reality, actually didn’t seem to really matter.

As we passed one stud farm after another, on a journey that, if the map was to be believed, should have taken about two hours (yet in reality took at least double that), Ken was completely oblivious to the fact that I was writing a song - it was just something I did surreptitiously in my head in between conversations.

When we returned to Ireland a few weeks later with a coach full of actors and film crews, I’d had my eyes tested and was in possession of a brand new pair of glasses - somehow, everything appeared to look a little bit different - for a start it wasn’t raining.

Right from the onset, our expedition was destined to become eventful, if nothing else. On the morning of our flight, Leeds had become completely gridlocked by snow, which although this seemed to pose no great problems to people heading to the airport from the Dales, it did however, create a bit of a major issue for those from the city - it took me well over an hour to get there, and I only live ten minutes away. Meanwhile, Joyline, a Zimbabwean asylum seeker who had been told by the authorities that she didn’t have the appropriate documentation with which to travel, turned up anyway, and with God on her side and only a minute to spare, was let through the gate. Then, when we boarded the plane, there

was an announcement over the tannoy to say that there was a missing passenger, who we realised was one of our students - a very introverted chap called John who had fallen asleep in the airport.

In spite of all this, and after a flight that took us from heavy snow into brilliant sunshine, we arrived in Dublin, where, for the long coach journey that lay ahead, Ken bought a multi-pack of what he thought to be fairly tame rom-com videos (which is what it said on the packaging), yet turned out to be a trilogy of some pretty heavy low-life films including 8 Mile, of which, after the twentieth ‘mother fucker’, the coach driver turned to Ken and said “it’s not the Sound of Music is it?”.

These were just a few of the incidents from the, anything but exhaustive, list of events.

We were staying in an isolated, and slightly ramshackled Youth Hostel, about seven miles outside of Kinvara, where in it’s former days W.B.Yeats had met with Lady Gregory to form the Irish National Theatre. Now run by an American called Brendan from Portland, Oregon, who had some tenuous family link to Galway, and his wife Melissa, who spent most of her time running rock’n’roll coach tours of America, the hostel was managed in a somewhat haphazard manner - often in the absence of it’s wardens.

When we arrived, we found that the annexe where the actors were going to be staying had no working lock on the door, the holes in the walls that we’d identified on our recce had been plastered, but had failed to be painted, and the kitchen didn’t seem to have a single piece of matching crockery in it’s entire canteen - but, hey, we were in rural Ireland, and none of this seemed to matter - at least that’s what we thought.

background : Youth Hostel in Wales, not Ireland

The week had been great, everybody seemed to bond, we ate well, got some filming done and generally had a good time. On the eve of the actors’ departure, we arrived early at Winkles, our preferred hostelry, for an Irish Dancing class and stayed on for an evening of bon-homie and a few fizzy pops. We arrived back at the hostel in good spirits and were just settling down to

a session of pleasant chat and cups of tea, when one of the students from the annexe arrived to announce that there was a drunk man in the girl’s dorm.

Unbeknownst to us, the handyman from the hostel had been plying the female students with drinks all night, and had come to receive what he considered to be his rightful entitlement. He was, to say the least, totally ratted - his hand gripping a can of Stella as he menacingly rocked from one foot to the other. We later found out from Brendan (who at this point in time had appeared to have locked himself in his living quarters only to be blighted by chronic deafness), that the best mate of our inebriate had just committed suicide - which had caused him to become a littlebit unhinged.

Being successful in our application for the post of negotiators, Ken and myself set about coercing our man into vacating the premises, as well as convincing both him and his mate (who spent the whole interlude quietly in the shadows), that it would be brilliant idea for them to get into their white transit van and politely fuck off back to where they came from. This was of course done with absolute tact and decorum.

Our negotiations went round in circles as we followed him in and out of the hostel, like sheepdogs trying to herd their flock. We would start off by suggesting that it would probably be a good idea if he went home, and he would counter our argument with his chosen preference of staying exactly where he was.

Meanwhile, whilst all this was going on, Ian, a mature student and ex-copper was all set to demobilise the chap in a totally professional, and undeniably efficient manner at a moments notice, aided and abetted by Kevin, whose sleeves were already rolled up.

After about an hour of this Groundhog Day conversation, both parties were getting a bit bored, so our friend decided to up the ante by suggesting that we had a fight - all of this delivered in a totally unemotional and matter-of-fact manner: “You’re English and I’m Irish, lets have a fight - it’s what we do”. His proposal, however, met with complete indifference, “No - you’re alright” I think we replied.

It became a process of gentle attrition and eventually, on the two hour anniversary of his arrival, either we must have numbed him into submission or he was becoming desperate for another drink - whatever the case we finally managed to corral him into his van and wave him on his merry way.

An hour later, the police from Gort (the town that is, not the humanoid robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still) eventually arrived, in force, with a SWAT team of two - there’d been an accident which had prevented both them, and what must have been the entirety of the town’s constabulary, from coming to our rescue any earlier. Undeterred, we entered into a lengthy discussion about what they could and couldn’t do (mainly the latter) which concluded in their strategically drawn-up proposal that we should give them a ring if he should choose to return to the crime of the scene - and they left us to it.

Having a duty of care for our students, Ken elected to stand guard outside the annexe - or, to be more precise, sit guard, armed with a book and a cup of tea. Melissa, a dry humoured and inquisitive student who needed yet another cigarette before she finally retired for the night, asked him “What are you going to do if he turns up again - read to him?”

- oh, how we laughed.

background : Madonna, Kinvara

All of this, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with Heart of Mine, except for the tenuous link mentioned at the beginning, however, it is an episode that I’m not going to forget in a hurry.

the berkley hotel: salvation road I was driving down Heaven’s Highway.

Been searching for Salvation Road.

Aint nothing been going my way, My head’s about to explode.

Saw Jesus in the supermarket, Wearing trainers and a Nike hood.

I said buddy I’ll see you on Sunday, He said OK, but it’ll do you no good.

I don’t need your pity, That much is true I don’t need redemption honey, ‘cause honey I’ve got you. ( I ) saw your picture in the Sunday paper, I tore it out and put it on my wall I fell in love with your curvaceous body ( I ) don’t wanna touch I just wanna talk I was standing on the corner at midnight, The warm wind blowing through my hair I called out your name little darling You said hello But you weren’t there Baker / Creswell Tony Baker : vocals / rhythm guitar / samples / ukulele Mark Creswell : banjo / bass / drums / keyboards

this page : Illustration for Salvation Road

When recording Salvation Road, I felt that the song was lacking a little bit of depth, so I hit upon the idea of writing a story to narrate over the top of the song. This turned a three minute song into an epic eight minutes (well it might not seem that much to a Grateful Dead fan, but to me that’s pretty damn long), it also threw up a few issues regarding having to write and recite something that kept up with the narrative of the song.

James Munroe was the son of a travelling preacher, a sickly and malnourished child with few redeeming qualities, who, at the age of seven, would fall into trances at will whilst the serpents that he held above his head would writhe but never bite him.

His fathers brethren believed that he was a direct descendant – a messenger of the Lord and latter-day saviour - but his father was a trickster and an alcoholic, and the only thing that he believed in was the dollar bill and the bottle of moonshine that it would buy him.

One night, underneath the illuminated sign for the small town of Black Rock, and with a bottle coursing its way through his veins his father attempted to beat him for the last time - but James was now a fully grown young man, and his fathers head was no match for the rock that he held in his hand.

He left his body on the side of the road, and taking the keys to his fathers 1969 convertible, he drove off down the road to he knew not where.

Mesmerised by the lights of a nearby city, he pulled off the highway and checked in at the Berkely Hotel – an establishment patronised by charlatons, crack addicts and existentialist boogie woogie men.

According to his father’s sermons, the city was the playground of the devil, where his evil work could be seen on every street corner – and James was truly spooked. The flashing neon lights of the neighbouring strip joints were giving him headaches, and he was beginning to hallucinate. Wherever he looked, he saw the face of Jesus – it seemed like everybody bore his image, but as soon as he got close to them, they would turn on him, and he would run away.

Like his father lying on the side of the road, he was cast out, abandoned, a loner in a big city.

One morning, in the lobby of the hotel, he was thumbing through the pages of a Sunday Magazine, when he came across an article

about the world of Vaudeville – debauched stories of the tawdry existencies that lay beneath the greasepaint and bright lights – scandalous tales of its glamour and dereliction. And as he turned the page, he came upon an image of such beauty that he had never seen before – a full page photograph of a burlesque dancer blowing a kiss at the camera. He was immediately entranced by her glittering costume with its sequins and arrangement of peacock feathers – that to James looked like the wings of a celestial angel. Casting his eye around the room to check that nobody was watching him, he tore out the picture and, hiding it in his pocket, he returned to his room.

For the rest of the day he sat motionless on his bed staring at the picture that he held in his hands until the stained curtains of his room finally cut out the last remaining light of the day.

It was then that it came to him – he would build a shrine – a celebration of her splendour. He would stick her picture on the wall and would adorn it with flowers and trinkets, and anything that would be a testament to her perfection. Over the weeks, his construction grew, and what was once a sparse arrangement of wilting crysthanthemums, became a cornucopia of flora that seemed straight from a flower shop window.

For all of his 19 years, James was an innocent when it came to matters of the flesh – it’s not that he was without desires, but that these were purely of a metaphysical nature. His days were now spent in his tabernacle in perpetual worship. He barely left his room. And if he did, it was at night, - and then it was to go down to the diner on the corner of Macey Street to stare out of the window drinking coffee , lost in thought, and harbouring the desperate hope that he might, one day, see the object of his desire.

One night in late August, he’d been at his table with the same cup of coffee, totally immersed in his staring for over an hour when he saw her on the other side of the road. There was no mistaking her features, the graceful line of her nose, her deep brown eyes and her flowing hair – but where were her peacock wings?peacock James leapt from his table, the dregs of his cup spilling into the saucer as he stepped into the warm midnight air.

He became frozen on the spot – a rabbit caught in the headlights – struck dumb by her image made flesh. He called out to her – although he didn’t know her name. A car pulled up – a Cadillac with flaking chrome trim and headlights that burnt his eyes.

He called her again – and as she opened the door to the car, she looked up at James and smiled, and blew him a kiss.

And then she was gone.