1979 - Telephone Girl

It was July 1979. We had gone from Woodstock to Altamont – hope to disillusion – in 2 years that flashed past like a 2 minute metal thrash. We had been fooled again. Far from dying before we got old we were the generation destined to become an unprecedented burden on the caring professions in the 21^st century. Our Damned New Rose had become just Another Brick in the Wall. We didn’t realise it. We felt it. Something had just run out.

We were in a recording studio in Denmark Street courtesy of the old boss. The father of a college friend, he was a former stage conjuror turned accountant. He now made tax liabilities disappear. One afternoon 2 young men had come into his office in suburban Surrey seeking advice. Instead of a fee, he settled for a share in the band they were managing. That band became one of the grossest rock dinosaurs in the world, spawning a brood of similarly successful bands with big hair. So I suppose our 2 days in the studio, for which we were truly grateful, were just a few tax deductible peanuts.

The studio had the look and feel of a sauna. Low ceilings, all pine boarded, it was the length and breadth of a long garage. The control room immediately above, also windowless, was accessed via a loft ladder. There was no visual contact between the two. Peter, the engineer, said this helped everyone concentrate on the sound. We sweated it out.

The 24 track desk all but filled the control room running lengthwise down the middle with the 2 inch tape deck at the far end. Opposite the desk in the corners of the room were 2 stacks of JBL speakers, floor to ceiling, with corresponding 4 inch mini speakers on each corner of the desk itself. These were used for mixing things that would be heard mainly on transistor radios and old car stereos. Peter sat enthroned behind the desk on one of those large swivel leather chairs favoured by “executive directors” whose abilities are generally limited to sitting in large swivel leather chairs. This did not apply to Peter. We had had enough experience of amateurs behind mixing desks to appreciate his expertise.

It felt cramped and cosy. How it had accommodated the monsters of rock hair who had recently been there mixing an album, more renowned for its provocative cover than for its contents, seemed to defy known physical laws.

We had some prestigious and fine looking instruments. Three Fender guitars – a Jazz bass, an Esquire and a Stratocaster – all made in California before Leo Fender sold out to CBS in 1963.  The white Stratocaster was the peach. It had been sold to the lead player by another friend so that he could buy an engagement ring. He told me recently that it is today worth many many times the value of the ring he bought.

To our untuned ears they sounded even better than they looked with the snap and drawl we wanted. To the engineer, denied the visual balm of their warm wooden and battered beauty, it was purgatory. How many times did he stop us? Eventually he came down into the studio with a guitar tuner but gained little relief.

Bashford - electrician by day and patron of the arts by night. Bashford had a large brown and beaten Mercedes van cunningly adapted for the transporting of gigging bands. It had 2 rows of old aircraft seats facing each other behind the cab and adjacent to the sliding side door. The double doors at the rear gave access to the remaining space which could accommodate all the PA, lighting, instruments and contraband the semi-pro musician desired.

We fought over the 2 front passenger seats rather than be condemned to the tedium of hours in windowless gloom.

Bashford was an explosion of reddish brown wiry hair shaped like a bearskin with piercing yet grinning eyes peering out from within. His head was balanced above a relaxed leather jacket itself supported by khaki denims and Doc Martens which had that lived-in look. His girlfriend once told me that he did not use a bed. He slept curled up on the floor fully clothed. He disappeared regularly to North Africa spending time in the desert with nomadic tribes doubtless curling up on their floors. His prize possession, a piece of amber the size of a plum, was gifted him by one of his hosts. He would caress it in his palm and let you look at it while he smiled on.

He was often accompanied on missions by other live music patrons and medieval roadies with receding hair lines, lank shoulder length tresses, protruding and stubbled jaws sucking hand rolled smokes. My mother once caught a glimpse of them through the side door of the van and exclaimed “it looks like Planet of the Apes in there.” 

A woman drove into the back of the van one night on the Balcombe Road on the way to a gig. More shocked by the crash or the sight of Bashford, I could not tell. She was raving excitedly about the van and how old it was and how tatty it was and how dirty it was and how poor the lights were .... Outraged and indignant Bashford drew himself up to his full height and in resonating Churchillian tones protested “Madam. This is a Mercedes van.”

Gigs were quite a lark followed by unbelievable hangovers.

Apart from the difficulty with tuning, Peter was obviously not enjoying his first brush with the new wave. He was surly and monosyllabic. We recorded 4 tracks without guide vocals over a day and a half leaving us the latter part of the final day to do the vocal tracks. After a run through of the first song Peter melted, remarking, “You can sing then.” It transpired he was a vocal specialist. He revealed that it was not uncommon to record songs with professional singers a phrase at a time because that was all they could manage to get right in one go. We breezed through the vocals for the remaining tracks with some helpful direction on harmonies from our new friend. Then we settled in to watch him do the final mix, lobbing in our own ideas and suggestions at random.

Another sharp pin prick of reality came from the manager of one of the most commercially successful of the bands riding the punk wave at that time. A friend of a friend, we met him in town for dinner then went to see one of his acts at the Lyceum. A few weeks later he came to see us. He was large, warm, friendly and Welsh. After we played, he came and found me. It felt like put his arm round my shoulder. He asked me how many gigs we had done in the last year. “About 25 to 30,” I lied.  “Alastair,” he said, “the bands I manage are doing 250 to 300 gigs a year.” He paused. “They don’t make mistakes.” And he walked away.

Our output rate was poor. The distilled product of 3 years amounted to little more than a very short, difficult, first album. The old boss found something lacking in our recording but offered us another opportunity – a Saturday morning in the studio – to show what we could do that was fantastic. Was it the sense of urgency he gave us, the fact that Peter had just completed an all night session, or was it just the last hurrah? The tracks we recorded that morning had an edge and a presence, were louder and more intense than those from the previous session. Even more gratifying, but really too late, one song, a new one, found that point we had been looking for somewhere between Captain Beefheart and the Meters.

We sent copies to everyone. John Peel played a track. “Dandy name for a band,” he said. But within a month the Stratocaster had been sold for a motorbike, the drummer had left to pursue a career in financial services and I was left wondering how much longer the girl in the telephone box on the Bath Road would keep calling me up.