Informative years
My first musical project was playing cymbals in a marching band - after a great deal of whining I graduated to the bugle.
As you know the bugle is a wind instrument that has no valves. It resembles a pair of bike handle bars that have been involved in a particularly nasty accident. The bugle is second only to a car alarm in terms of its musical charm and subtlety (it also turned my dog against me).
On being taught the instrument I was told it only had five notes. I mucked around with it a bit and found three more that no one else knew were there. I was informed these notes were NOT REAL. This threw my entire world into chaos and the quality of my playing really suffered as a result.
My next musical fracas was some years later when I embarked in the first 'clean metal' band ever to practice in a garage in Plymouth. Electric guitars were played though a bass amp with no over drive, we had no drummer but we did have a bass player who utterly resented the fact he had to learn to play the instrument in order to be in a band. He would sit and shuffle all the way through practice, chain smoking, grumbling and criticising my H.P. Lovecraft inspired songs.
We were called Internal Fracture (at the time I didn't stop to wonder what other kind of fracture a human being could have). I left town and they carried on without me eventually acquiring overdrive, another name and songs about autopsies and disease - just imagine Death Metal songs sung with a Devon accent!
Further down the line I became involved with a 'soft folk' outfit in Sheffield. We did a world tour of Sheffield and then everyone left town except me. It must have been something I played.
The Crossroads
Everybody goes to the crossroads sometime, Robert Johnson, Old Nick, Benny. When Johnson came back he was a different player so they say.
All the decent crossroads are in the States, so that's where I went. I went with nothing but metal under my belt and a nasty habit of writing songs that had no repeating chord structures or words...
Yes, I vanished from the shores of Albion in 1990 and when I came back I wasn't any better than when I went (the devil must have been having a day off).
My first ever gig was up in the wooded hills of Pennsylvania. Some of the folks down town looked like they'd walked straight out of a Tom Waits song and it was rumoured that a Dragon of the KKK was holed up somewhere nearby. Was it a coincidence that the first ever piece of music I ever learned some eight years earlier was the Duelling banjos?
I sang my crooked songs to the hill dwellers, songs that were odd, even by my standards. I escaped with my life.
While I was there I did get to see the fantastic guitarist Keith Hinchliffe (whom I would later meet here in Sheffield). Keith did such mind blowing stuff on the guitar that it made me want to go and smash mine up and throw it out the window.
The Devil's Degree - Dark secrets
Everyone has their dark secrets. You want to know mine?
I did a business degree.
I ended up in the states for a year - visited the empty crossroads and spent much of the rest of the time at a Liberal Arts College studying Economics, Marketing, Accountancy and Witchcraft.
I became aquainted with the Maleus Maleficarum, the Compendium Maleficarum, Magick, 17th Century broadsheets and the Golden Bough amongst other 'demonic' texts.
It didn't hit me till later just how much magic mumbo jumbo had in common with economics.
Anyway, the Witchcraft module was great, I highly recommend it. The premise of the course was "Why you would be mad NOT to believe in Witchcraft in the 17th century."
I read many many contemporary accounts which consisted mostly of neighbourly disputes. For example, when a man couldn't get it up he blamed his wife's sister for putting a hex on him. When a woman burned the cooking she believed the teenager next door had cursed a dead hedgehog and put it under her sofa.
It was like Jeremy Kyle or Ricky Lake except that people literally suffered humiliation, torture and death in front of their whole community because someone had pointed a finger at them. Hmmm.
My favourite story was the one about the chap who claimed that a witch had stolen the entirety of his genitalia.
The male judges took this crime very seriously.
The court gave the witch a very hard talking to and made her vow her allegiance to Satan and all his little helpers. Eventually she yielded and revealed the whereabouts of the tackle.
She told them it was hidden up in a bird's nest.
The court demanded she return the gentlemen his jewels which she did, apparently.
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Overall I did very badly at Economics, Marketing and Accounting but I did get an 'A' in Witchcraft.
Yes it was a fascinating course, sadly there were no practicals.
Drug zombies and trousers
I had a strange encounter with an arse when I played at Glastonbury one year. It all started in the backstage area at Lost Vagueness. I'd played with Poke earlier in the evening and was just winding down - away from the ceaseless traffic of festival goers in the field outside they swarmed in colonies everywhere, like Army Ants bent on devouring the flesh of entertainment.
It was getting late and there wasn't much going on at the festival, rumours had circulated that there was a secret party inside the Lost Vagueness compound and like sharks sniffing blood, hoards of party hungry fiends clammered at the gates desperate to get at it their faces bloated with narcotic excess.
I was trapped.
I heard a security guard yell, "If you want to leave, go now while you can!" as he used all his vital force to keep the zombies from bursting through the gates. Just at that moment, seven silver Elvises (Elvi?) leapt from the back of a truck in the compound and made straight for the gates. I grabbed my guitar and followed the resplendent procession of quiffs and sideburns. The security guard hawled open the gate and urged us through. We cut a path through the bloodshot mob and broke free!
I wound up in the Small World tent (in a quiet corner of the Green Fields) and got up to do a few songs on a tiny stage. I was singing the Wheels Are Broken when a dazed, hazy fellow stumbled towards me muttering something unintelligible (and probably insulting).
He got on stage and started performing a drunken mocking dance by my mic stand - wiggling his back side like he was a girl in a bikini in a rap video.
I persevered with the song.
He undid his belt and dropped his trousers.
He presented his arse to me.
I'd suffered stage invaders before but they'd always
kept their clothes on. There was only one thing I could do as I sat there on the chair strumming my guitar, staring at those two shining orbs of flesh - I sang to his arse like it had never been sung to before!
By the end of the song he made an awkward departure as if things hadn't quite gone according to plan.
There was laughter in the audience and I don't think either of us knew for sure who they were laughing at.
Pies anyone?
Pork pies. Have you ever wondered how those black bits end up in the crust and why there are holes in the lid of the pie and how that horrible yellow jelly ends up around the meat?
Then read on....
I got a job in a pie factory or should I say it got me? It was a wretched place, an abbatoir for the human soul. Clinical-white walls, grimy floors and suspect personnel. In the space of a month I worked in six positions. This wasn't so much an aptitude test but more a strategy of damage limitation.
I was awful.
I was awful at everything I did. I ruined hundreds of pies, upset the resident psychopath and nearly burnt my fingers off.
It could have been worse.
When I was assigned to my first post I was given a metal stick with four intentionally bent spikes sticking out along its length. One was required to use this medievel contraption to stab four pies simultaneously, raise the impaled morsels and then transfer them from the oven trays to the sorting trays.
I was a slow worker.
I was a pie mangler.
So my supervisor moved me to a room in hell. I was presented with this metal shower head type thing that had four nozzles sticking out and a trigger on the handle. This grim shower head was connected to a hosepipe that in turn was hooked up to a vat of hot yellow jelly.
When one squeezed the trigger the said hot yellow jelly spurted out in most disarming arcs. My job was to inject the hot jelly into the cooked pies. You could tell my pies from the rest, they were very yellow, all over. They dripped in ways they shouldn't have dripped.
They moved me on soon enough.
They placed me in front of a glazing machine, which sprayed a fine mist of egg white over uncooked pies.
My workmate was a man known as Mad Dog. He was short and had 'I love mum' tatooed on his arm. He'd obviously thought twice about this because he'd gone back to the tatooist and had it crossed out - like blue crossbones over a skull of love.
My work rate on the glazing machine was a bit too slow, Mad Dog gave up on me in disgust and I had to work the machine alone. Thank goodness.
I put a tray on the conveyor of the glazing machine which dutifully carried the pies under the spray, I then put another on right behind it to increase my productivity. I had two trays going through the glazer simultaneously - what a genius. The next part of the job was to walk around the machine and lift off the trays as they came through. If one did not do this the trays would continue along to the end of the conveyor and capitulate to gravity by tumbling off and end up on to the factory floor.
This job went well for a while till I had an idea for a song.
The next thing I heard was some loud clatter.
I looked down to see uncooked pies littered across the factory floor in front of the ovens. I bent down and proceeded to place them back on the tray, trying to remove bits of grit from them as I did so.
As I was kneeling there the other tray came crashing down on my head showering me with more raw pies.
I thought 'This is it.'
My supervisor hoved into view.
I apologised thinking 'There go my wages'
My supervisor shrugged and said "Put them back on the tray and stick 'em in the oven."
Next day I was moved to the cold storage unit, it didn't go well. I was sent into a freezer that was exacty minus eighteen degrees centigrade. I was sent in without gloves to retrieve a metal tray. The next day the skin started falling off my hands - it was somewhat painful. Doing up my own flies had become a thing of the past. Some people would have called it quits but o no, not me. I reported for work requesting light duties.
My supervisor led me to the room where operatives picked up cooked pies to check them for quality - it must be said a month after working there the word quality had lost all meaning. Anyway, I pointed out to my supervisor that flesh was actually falling off my hands and I was in danger of contributing unwanted ingredients to the products.
They fired me. I think they'd had enough. I know I had.
And that's why I became a musician.