Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts. Tell today’s groovy fuckers about The Tube on a Friday teatime, and they probably won’t quite get what you’re on about, but for those of us of a certain age, there was a certain frisson, a delight, in tuning in to see what Jools Holland and Paula Yates were going to throw at you this week. The Jam, say - or The Icicle Works, Carmel, The Tygers of Pan Tang or, for one week only, a callow young fellow in a buckskin fringed jacket with a floppy fringe and one of those ubiquitous Ovation-type guitars that you couldn’t play sitting down because the rounded, bowl-shaped back would slide off your leg.
Since I was listening almost exclusively to Neil Young around this time I was instantly intrigued, not least when Roddy Frame - for it was he - started playing a lovely song about going down the dip or somesuch and then followed it with a super pop song called Oblivious which had one of those amazing one note guitar solos (there’s that Neil Young thing again) which veered off into an amazing jazz/folk arpeggio* before the last chorus. The drummer had Roto-toms, I believe the bass player was dressed as a Gaucho. I was hooked.
Obviously at this point in my nascent musical career I was nowhere near accomplished enough to pull off either of those tunes, but I could just about manhandle my way through The Birth of the True, with it’s The Passenger-like intro, and descending chord chorus which a gleeful Albion Mills** audience stoically endured for much of 1984 and doubtless subsequently spotted a lyrical lift which made its way into Showtime***, part of the epochal This Much Talent oeuvre.
Flash forward three years (time seemed to move so much slower then) and those nice people at WEA, having inexplicably passed on signing my band The World Service, had ploughed their money instead into keeping Roddy Frame’s career afloat and had not only subbed him enough cash to go to America to make the album Love, they had also shelled out on a promo video which went on a compilation that we - a grateful record retail industry - were supposed to keep on a loop so that the good people of (say) Grimsby might be so entranced by the performances that they might enquire of the artist and purchase one of these new-fangled CD singles everybody was talking about (Walk Out to Winter still being their familiar calling card it was, of course, included on the EP). I loved it. I loved the song, moody black and white visuals, the way the backing singers came in on “…radio!” - it was one of the ones I used to switch the sound over for, and not even Aha got that treatment.
Flash forward again, and The Drummer is enthusing about a suggestion The Keyboard Player has made about something we can add to the Picturehouse set. With our recent regime of weekly rehearsals and a four-gig month under our belts**** we have been hoovering up songs from the last century and although he can’t remember the title or the artist he can hum the distinctive intro- “Bah na baaah (blap!) Bahp baaaahhh” - I know instantly what it is. There is some discussion about how to end a track that fades out on the album (with a saxophone solo) however with recourse to a phone, a bluetooth speaker hook up and an internet library featuring the live version….well, it’s a long way from sitting down to tea on a Friday afternoon in case you miss something and don’t know what they’re chanting on telly in between Balaam and The Angel sets.
And so it is that I find myself in a Kew Gardens-like Pickerel***** in Stowmarket, ready to declaim about a vision of love wearing boxing gloves and peel off the celebratory solo that - fortunately for me - follows the Aeolian scale with which I (and by default anyone who’s heard me play a solo in the last forty three years) am so familiar. All we have to do is count in the intro - a drum fill played by a keyboard player is never going to be a walk in the park for the adept, and so The Keyboard Player counts it in while The Drummer, glasses sliding slipperarily down his nose frowns in concentration but nevertheless comes in adroitly on the five. And we’re off. Girls in their Summer clothes (cf Bruce Springsteen), boys in cargo shorts and football tops, old friends, bookends. Silver splits the blue.
*Cascading shards of tonal delight, if you will.
**Don’t look for it, it’s not there any more.
***Still available on Bandcamp, people.
****Doesn’t sound much, but this time last year we were gigging quarterly.
*****The humidity, not the plantlife.
That difficult second solo EP in full https://thismuchtalent.bandcamp.com/album/belgian-whistles
Aztec Camera on The Tube in 1983 https://youtu.be/liZyggMFWXQ?si=uLp0JF40na8_oJmI
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