From fetchpop Thu Jun 3 01:23:52 1999 Return-Path: Received: from router2.mail.cornell.edu (ROUTER2.MAIL.CORNELL.EDU [132.236.56.16]) by postoffice2.mail.cornell.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA25330 for ; Wed, 2 Jun 1999 20:34:00 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by router2.mail.cornell.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) id UAA14732 for jjs15@postoffice4.mail.cornell.edu; Wed, 2 Jun 1999 20:34:00 -0400 (EDT) Received: from alumni.hmc.edu (alumni.hmc.edu [209.182.194.40]) by router2.mail.cornell.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA14701 for ; Wed, 2 Jun 1999 20:33:58 -0400 (EDT) Received: from palrel3.hp.com (palrel3.hp.com [156.153.255.226]) by alumni.hmc.edu (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id RAA09677 for ; Wed, 2 Jun 1999 17:33:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rhiannon.rsn.hp.com (rhiannon.rsn.hp.com [15.99.98.102]) by palrel3.hp.com (8.8.6 (PHNE_17135)/8.8.5tis) with ESMTP id RAA10260 for ; Wed, 2 Jun 1999 17:33:42 -0700 (PDT) Received: by rhiannon.rsn.hp.com (1.39.111.2/16.2) id AA180220018; Wed, 2 Jun 1999 19:33:38 -0500 Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 19:33:38 -0500 Message-Id: <199906030033.AA180220018@rhiannon.rsn.hp.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-PH: V4.1@router2.mail.cornell.edu (Cornell Modified) From: Cliff McCarthy To: john_stimson@alumni.hmc.edu Subject: Dave Stewart's autobiographical linernotes [long] X-Mailer: VM 6.30 under Emacs 19.34.1 Reply-To: Cliff McCarthy X-Keywords: X-UID: 42 Status: RO Content-Length: 36096 Lines: 636 Newsgroups: rec.music.progressive Organization: A2000 Kabeltelevisie en Telecommunicatie From: age@cable.a2000.nl.nospam (Age) Subject: Dave Stewart's autobiographical linernotes (was Re: Do you recommend Egg?) Date: Thu, 20 May 1999 09:01:37 GMT This has actually been printed in both Decca/Deram Egg CD booklets. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DAVE STEWART AUTOBIOGRAPHY PART ONE : THE START OF MY CAREER (1968-72) I went to a public (= private) school called The City Of London School. You didn't have to be particularly posh to go to this school, but your parents had to be pretty rich to meet the fees. My parents were pretty poor, but I circumvented the commercial considerations by winning a scholarship. This, and getting a No. 1 single in 1981, were the highest achievements of my life according to my mum - all the bits before and in between have been crap. Anyway, at the aforementioned C. of .LS. I met two extraordinary oiks named Steve Hillage and Hugo Martin Mongomery-Campbell, like me ink-bespattered, vaguely rebellious, academically unfocussed and interested in music. I can still remember Steve Hillage in short trousers and a cap, but have managed to resist the temptation to sketch them, in biro, on his album covers. I was an embryonic guitar-twanger when I met these guys, but Steve was so far ahead of me in that field (his parents had bought him a Strat and an AC30,and he could play barre chords) that I soon gave it up in favour of the organ. Mont played bass, guitar, piano and everything else and he and Steve formed a band, in the 6th form (1967). I was desperate to join, and made myself indespensible by helping them carry their amps etc. We were into Cream/Hendrix, the Blues, progressive and psychedelic stuff - I was particularly into the Nice. Steve used to do a lot of guitar solos and we used to do versions of 'Foxy Lady', 'Rondo' (for me), innumerable FleetwoodMac/Cream songs and no original material! We were pretty much a school band, but not a bad one, and we found a drummer (East Ender Clive Brooks) through an ad. in Melody Maker. The day we auditioned Clive, Steve and Mont went out for a coffee - we were rehearsing in an office block in Baker St. where Mont's dad used to work - and met Jimi Hendrix in the street. He was staring at the window of the Beatles' 'Apple' shop, and Steve approached him and asked him to come up and have a play with us. He was very nice about it, but said he was too busy...I wish he'd had a bit more time! Uriel (for that was the name of our band) did a few youth club type gigs, but then, in the summer of '68, we got our BIG BREAK. A totally trustworthy gentleman called Johnny Quinn offered us a residency at the Ryde Castle Hotel on the Isle of Wight. We'd get to play every night, free accommodation and a chance to rehearse in the venue every afternoon. Actually, the landlady of the hotel, a venerable woman named Mrs. Ross, took one look at Steve and Mont's bare feet and refused us permission to even enter the hotel during daylight hours. We ended up sleeping in the van and having to rehearse silently (difficult!), but we managed to knock up one or two original tunes, written by Mont - 'Egoman' is one title I remember. The Ryde Castle Hotel gig was basically shit, but we got to support Arthur Brown and Fairport Convention. At the end of the summer, Steve Hillage said he was quitting to go to university. A shame, for as Clive Brooks remarked to me in later years, "If Steve had stayed, by now we'd be as good as theMahavishnu Orchestra"... think he's right, readers ? As a trio, Uriel dropped all their blues numbers and began to develop a more classical leaning with Mont's polytonal harmonies and my sub-Emerson light classical bits. We fell in with Middle Earth, the psychedelic club in Covent Garden, and got to play there every fort night supporting the likes of Captain Beefheart and Love Sculpture. The "managers" of Middle Earth, two semi-likeable chaps called Dave and Paul, started an agency and offered to manage us. One condition- we had to change our name. 'Uriel' was too weird and, get this, apparently sounded too much like 'URINAL' !!! And so, Egg was born. We hated the name, but it was popular with typesetters. We started to get more gigs (probably because the posters were so cheap - I remember doing a gig at the Doncaster Top Rank Suite where the bill was 'Yes', 'If' and 'Egg' - a coincidence? Surely not. We blew Yes off the stage, incidentally...) Egg was part of the Middle Earth package of bands that included 'Writing Of The Wall' (who did an absolutely brilliant opening number where the singer used to stand on the organ and leap off), and Decca Records were offered this package for an intended Middle Earth label. I don't know whether Dave and Paul ever got the label started, but Decca approached us separately (I guess we must have done a demo. Where is that now ?!?) and said they wanted to sign us. By now we were doing all "original" material, although some of it was nicked from Stravinsky, Holst etc, and we were reconciled to being an organ trio. At first we missed the guitar, but after auditioning a bit we realised not many guitarists were as good as Steve so we decided not to replace him with an inferior model. We did at least two BBC Radio sessions - best one was the Pete Drummond Show - and a BBC2 television show called 'Colour Me Pop' (!) presented by Michael Parkinson. At the time of recording our first LP ('Egg' - wotta title !) for Decca things were going well and the band was growing in popularity. It continued to improve for a year or so, but then after recording 'The Polite Force' album Decca told us they didn't want to release it. Why, the, had they let us record it ? Because someone in the sales/marketing department had failed to speak to someone in the contracts dept. presumably; but attempt to understand the workings of record companies' employees' minds and you'll end up as mad as they are. This is the worst thing you can do to a band though - let them sweat blood over recording an album they're really proud of, with all its false starts, nerves, anxiety, eventual triumphant completion of good backing tracks, hours of overdubbing, problems with headphones, more nerves, the occasional brilliant bit of playing, arguments about the mix, persuading the drummer the snare's loud enough, getting through the mix without fucking up, making sure all the mixes are the right level, sorting out the running order - and then say, "Oh, by the way - we're not putting it out". This has happened to my friend Jakko THREE TIMES. No wonder he's a little cynical about the record business. Although Decca eventually changed their corporate mind, persuaded partly by our producer Neil Slaven who was a Decca employee, the blow to band morale was quite bad, and it coincided with gigs beginning to dry up. We had no contacts outside Britain, which meant we had to concentrate on touring this wretched little island where, in truth, not enough people care about music that is a bit... uh... weird, or different at least. Finally, we fell in with a bod called Roy Fisher who was manager of that venerable blues organisation, The Groundhogs. Despite the stunning incompatibility of our musical styles, we were stuck out on tour together doing the Bristol Colston, Manchester Free Trade, Birmingham Town, Newcastle Town Hall sort of venue - the Groundhogs headling, of course.Tony McPhee was friendly enough in a gruff kind of way, but he got a bit cross when closely questioned on how come our soundchecks only lasted 3 minutes. My memories of that era are quite strong. The bit in 'Spinal Tap' where they get lost trying to find the stage is particularly funny to me, as exactly that happened to me in some big Sheffield civic institution. Three minutes before the gig, I wandered off for a piss. 10 minutes later, I was still in the bowels of the building, clambering over packing crates, pieces of disused scenery from Norman Wisdom's 'Aladdin' show circa 1958, etc. I thought I could hear the crowd jeering and booing, but it might have been the civic plumbering. "The show must go on !", eh ? How? The gigs with the 'Hogs sort of toughened us up. It's like, you go into Green's Playhouse, Glasgow (now the Apollo) a dilettante, pretentious youth concerned about ART, and you come out a MAN ready to ROCK & ROLL and start a FOOD FIGHT at the BLUE BOAR. On one of the tours, Egg and the Groundhogs were joined by a great Welsh outfit called Quicksand - to be honest, they were the best band on the bill. But the 'Hogs always went down the best, generally provoking a sort of Pavlovian screaming riot that I found a bit disturbing. Tony McPhee and Ken (the drummer) seemed to be totally unaware of it, they just spent the whole time complaining about the monitors and how their "amps" were "crap". Let's leave Egg for a bit and talk about ARZACHEL who, as everyone now knows,were Uriel operating under a pseudonym. Uriel never did any recording, for the simple reason that we didn't have any original material - we were only schoolboys, remember. However, as soon as Egg had signed to Decca Records, the possibility of a Uriel LP came up. What happened was, we knew a chap called Peter Wicker who ran a demo studio called 'Studio 19' in Gerrard St, Soho. He had some connections with a foreigner named "Zak" who was running a label called 'Zel' (or was it the other way round ?). Anyway, Zak had noticed (somewhat belatedly) that "psykodalic" music was shifting a lot of units, so he asked Wicker to be on the lookout for a likely bunch of lads who knew how to make this noise. We had worked for Peter in his demo studio, thusly: An aspiring songwriter would send a cassette of his or her song with a view to having it "professionally" recorded. Peter would ring us up and we would attempt to work out the chords and bang out a version, with Mont handling the vocals. Unfortunately some of our efforts were so approximate that the client demanded his money back, but that's showbiz !! Again, though, WHERE ARE THOSE TAPES NOW ?!? Peter alerted us to the possibility of making a psychedelic album for Zak's label, and we were keen. Problem was, we'd signed an exclusive deal with Decca some weeks previously. Hence, the pseudonym. We drafted Steve Hillage (by now a student at Kent University) in to add psychedelic noise atmosphere and further disguise the Egg-ness of the project. The songs of Side One were specially written for the LP. Side Two was a "psychedelic jam" (a style we were expert in after many hours spent at the Middle Earth club) with nothing much pre-arranged except that it had to be long enough to fill the side - we actually held the last chord on for ages while watching the studio clock tick round; as soon as it hit the quarter past, we stopped playing. The budget - including our advance - was #250. We recorded and mixed it in one afternoon. We didn't know anything about recording, so if it sounds underwater it wasn't really anyone's fault. All I knew was, put some reverb on the organ! I'm surprised that anyone ever got interested in this LP, because we only gave it about 10 minutes thought. It was supposed to be a secret, but a guy called Philip - friend of "Jesus" (nee Bill Jellet, he of the white kaftan and nuts and berries - Bill was a good mate of ours) - got to know about it and told Melody Maker the sordid facts. I guess we would have owned up eventually, but we were pissed off with Philip at the time. Anyway, back at Egg. Following the Groundhogs tour, things got tough. We had enough material for a third album, but no deal and very few gigs. Mont decided to call it a day, as he was getting into a kind of spiritual quest that would not be enhanced by endless trips up and down the M1, even with the incentive of a fry-up at the Blue Boar thrown in. Clive and I were very upset at Mont's decision, but we didn't try to argue with him as we sort of sensed he'd made up his mind, and anyway, even if he'd stayed, we had no work! Clive had the idea of asking Hugh Hopper to join, but at that stage I didn't have the confidence to contemplate becoming the main writer in the group - traditionally Mont's role - so the band split up. Future evens were to partly compensate for the lack of interest that led to the band's demise, as in 1974 we got to opportunity to reform the band for the album 'The Civil Surface'. This effectively mopped up the unrecorded material from the post -'Polite Force' era, though we had to pad it out a little with some wind quartets Mont had written - not really Egg material ! Although the mix on the 'Civil Surface' is a bit naff (we couldn't persuade Clive that the drums were loud enough) I'm really glad we recorded 'Enneagram', one of my favourite Egg pieces. We used to steam through that at gigs - our opening number - and peoples' faces would drop. As for Steve Hillage's career around this time - within minutes of leaving Uriel and setting foot in the hallowed portals of Kent University (which is, of course in CANTERBURY, hours of waffle about which will come later), Steve had met singer Barbara Gaskin, now my recording partner and sweetheart. For this I am eternally grateful to him. Steve was apparently under the impression that universities were brimming with brilliant musicians waiting for the opportunity to fling aside their copies of 'The Medium Is The Message' by Marshall McLuhan, seize bass guitars or drum kits and lock immediately into a tight groove over which Steve would extemporize brilliant Stratocaster solos. Meeting Barbara was a good start, but the perfect rhythm section Steve had dreamed of was not to be found on the campus. After a year of abortive study (which all too frequently mutated into Occupying The Refectory and other popular student sports of the late 60's, such as Berating The Administration and Organising The Folk Club) - he packed it all in and came back to London to start his own band, 'Khan'. Khan were "managed" by Terry King, who also managed, or at least took money from, Caravan. Steve found a good rhythm section in Eric Peachey (drums) and Nick Greenwood (bass ex-Crazy World of Arthur Brown), but he never seemed to settle on the right organist. There was a chap called Dick, a nice enough guy and a good keyboard player, but there were some problems; apparently his girlfriend wouldn't let him do gigs on Sunday because that was the day she liked to cook him a special dinner. Or something. Anyway, by the time Khan came round to doing their 1st LP (again for good oldDecca) no permanent organist had been found, so I did it as guest musician. I was in Egg at the time, but was happy to play on the LP because I liked Steve and his songs. Eric Peachey was a great guy, too. He had long blonde hair and a really long ginger beard, so all you could see was this permanent smile. He also wore really bright coloured towelling socks that I have subsequently adopted as a personal fashion myself. (No, no - this kind of stuff is important!) It is a fact that, after Egg split up in 1972, I joined Khan as a full-time member - but this was shortlived. We did a handful of gigs, after which Steve broke the band up. It was a lot of pressure on him - 3 organists and 2 bassists in two years is a lot when you're trying to rehearse complex arrangements - and he would stay up all night writing the charts. Terry King's management had a strong leaning towards the you-do-all-the-work-and-I'll-take-the-commission style, and I always thought his permanent suntan made an interesting contrast with Steve's deathly pallor. So it wasn't a big surprise when Steve announced to us that he was off to France to play guitar with Kevin Ayers, and Khan was to be "diskhantinued". This unsurprising development left me out of work, with no immediate prospects for musical unemployment. How I filled the intervening months before a a casual call from drummer Pip Pyle changed my life is perhaps best not discussed on the pages of a musical magazine read by, I imagine,sensitive artistic types; suffice it to say that society in general and casual employment agencies in particular have dreamed up un imaginable tortures and humiliations for the unemployed organist "resting" between engagements. Many thanks to Fitter Stoke for typing ! PART TWO : HATFIELD AND THE NORTH (1973-75) After Egg split up, I spent some time doing menial jobs. These were mostly of a cruel and arbitrary nature, stuff that nobody else wanted to do : delivering mattresses to unbuilt hotelrooms, stuffing envelopes with invitations to sporting events that had taken place three weeks previously -that sort of thing. All very Kafka-esque, and rather depressing. I was living in a horrible house in South London with a bunch of bastards whose idea of communal living was to label the milk bottles "Kim's" or "Anne's" and draw up endless charts showing whose turn it was to do the washing up. it was usually mine. Was this how the rest of my life was to be ? Evidently not, because one day I got a call from a chap I vaguely knew called Pip Pyle. The line was bad and Pip tends to mumble down the 'phone, but I picked out "...new band...gig... at the moment... Dave Sinclair... Hammond organ... tape...". This sounded promising, so I invited Pip over to elucidate. When he arrived, he played me a tape of some of the most incomprehensible music I had ever heard, and studied my reaction keenly. This was, apparently, an early gig tape of Hatfield and the North with Dave Sinclair playing organ, but the sound quality was so terrible I couldn't hear anything. "Sounds interesting", I lied. We arranged for me to cart my Hammond over to Phil Miller's flat in Richmond so we could have a play. There I met Richard Sinclair and Phil, both of whom I was vaguely acquainted with, and we bashed through 'Nan True's Hole' and some other tunes. At the end of the audition, Pip said to me smilingly "Well Dave, I think it's fair to say that you're in the group now", at which point Phil butted in with "I don't think it's fair to say that at all!" and the two of them went off into the kitchen and had a row. I later learned that this row, or variations of it, had been going on since they were eighteen months old, as they had both grown up together in the same Hertfordshire village. The conflict was probably orginally based on the misappropriation of some toy or another. As it's now 1989 and the two of them still play in a band together, I think it lends weight to the theory that the most durable partnerships are ones where the partners can let off a little steam. Anyway, I never found out whether I got the gig or not, because before this larger issue could be settled Pip said they had a gig on Friday, and could I do it. This meant learning over an hour's worth of music, played without a break a la Matching Mole, in two days. Being a true professional, game old trouper, seasoned veteran, hardened campaigner, tough cookie, consummate entertainer and above all a STUPID BASTARD, I agreed. We played the gig, at South Morden College of Anaethetists (or somewhere), I bluffed my way through (constantly scrutinizing dozens ofsheets of manuscript paper and wondering where we'd got to), stopping occasionally when I got too lost, and the first hurdle was crossed. I discovered that I was stepping into a slot previously occupied by Phil's brother Steve, as well as Dave Sinclair, but it turned out that although the lads preferred the fuller organ sound to the lighter electric piano approach of Steve Miller, their real role model for the Hatfield keyboardist was Dave MacRae, ex-Matching Mole. I realised that in order to fulfil the band's expectations, I was going to have to do two things : (1) Get an electric piano, and (2) learn to play jazz, or something close. I must come clean at this point and say I am not a big jazz fan. I can appreciate, and sometimes enjoy, the musicianship involved, but there are too many conventions involved for me to really get off on it. On the other hand though, I had reached the stage where I needed to broaden my musical horizons a little. The neo-classical precision of Egg had given me enough technique to play most written rock music, but my improvising and ability to respond to what other musicians were playing needed to be worked on. I figured that playing with Hatfield and The North would help me develop a bit in those areas, and if the results were a little jazzier than what I was used to, it wasn't the end of the world... and it was certainly better than delivering mattresses. The electric piano problem was solved by an incredible piece of good luck. Pip had met Simon Draper and Richard Branson, who were about to start up Virgin Records. Simon liked what he heard of Hatfield (surely not the cassette Pip had played me? Jesus Christ...) and wanted to SIGN THE BAND UP! There you go; unbelievable, isn't it? You start up a band playing uniterrupted riffs for an hour with two other blokes playing crazed solos over the top, play in a couple of technical colleges, and the next thing you know two incipient moguls show up and start asking how much money you want to record an LP of this stuff. Those were the "good old days". If only it was like that now... I quite liked Richard Branson when I first met him. He invited us to his houseboat and played us 'Tubular Bells', which I told him would never sell. He also settled a dispute over whether Virgin should get our publishing or not, by challenging us to a game of darts in a local pub. We lost. All the music I wrote from 1973 to 1978 is still owned by Virgin Music. Subsequently, I have come to dread his seeminlgy nightly T.V. appearances - so, his latest boat/balloon/aeroplane has crashed in the Irish Sea? Why is this fucking NEWS? - and have watched with horror his burgeoning association with Margaret Thatcher, which will probably end up with him becoming Minister for the Arts. I also realise that Richard doesn't like music very much, except as a premise from which to go on and make more money. But back then, he was only a proto-mogul, and compared to some of the miserable old motherfuckers I'd known at Decca (who had names like Sir William Waldergrave and Lord Henry Fitzgerald Montgomery-Mountbattenshire) he didn't seem a bad type. One of the early group rows was about how to split up the advance money. I think we had about #2,000 to spend on equipment. Half of that went immediately on a "Zoot Horn" P.A.system, some more on a dodgy old van, until there was only about #800 left. The others insisted that I take #400 and buy a Fender Rhodes electric piano, even though my share should really have been only #200. They went on and on about it, and, as I said earlier, it seemed a necessary item for this band. Finally, I relented, though feeling bad about the inequality of the split. "Look, I appreciate you wanting me to have this piano", I explained "and I'll get it, but only on one condition. After I've had it a few months, I'll probably get really attached to it, so if the group breaks up I don't want you coming round asking for it back". There was a solid consensus of agreement on this, some hand-shaking, back-slapping and other solemn malebonding rituals. Two years later, when the band split up, Pip phoned me up. "It's about that Fender Rhodes. I reckon you should sell it and give me half the money. You had more of the advance than I did". AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'll leave it to the critics to discuss the merits of Hatfield's music, but there were some elements in it that I loved. Mainly, it was the sense of humour. The bit on the first album where the listener gets lost and rushes from speaker to speaker opening doors in an attempt to find the next track is great. Lots of musicians get mad stoned ideas like this, but very few of them actually record them. Although we presented our live set fairly seriously, there was an element of absurdity there too... Once, in a Dutch club, we filed out on stage and were poised to play our first number. But first,our roadie took this ridiculous little green plastic duck with a spring inside it and a sticky rubber pad on the bottom, and stuck it to the floor at the front of the stage. We even shone a lights on it. The idea is that after a while, the rubber pad loses its grip and the duck leaps about 4 foot up in the air... We sat staring at this thing raptly for about three minutes, and only when it finally went "sprooing" did I count in the first tune. For a certain period - I don't know why - Pip and I were really into smashing garden gnomes on stage. He used to do the actual smashing (it suited his temperament), but I was a willing accomplice, setting aside portions of the group's income for the procurement of gnomes and hammers. After soundchecks, Phil and Richard would retire to the dressing room to tune their guitars (a process I've seen Phil make last about 4 hours) but Pip and I would be off in search of a garden centre. It was sometimes difficult to explain to the assistants why we preferred gnomes that you could smash easily ("but Sir, this model will last you a lifetime !"), but it kept us amused. For variation, we once invited the Northettes, who were singing with us at a gig at the Roundhouse in London, to do the gnome smashing. Barbara Gaskin was dead against the idea, on the grounds that it was destructive. I explained the whole quintessential point of the thing was its mindless destructiveness, and, though unconvinced, she agreed to deal the death blows. Took her about three tries, though... These were good quality concrete gnomes, not your cheap plaster rubbish. Sometimes, when no gnomes were available, we'd use teapots instead, by now addicted tothe sound of cheap pointless consumer goods being ritually destroyed, and the satisfying crunch of plaster or porcelain fragments underfoot afterwards. The whole thing reached a horrifying climax at a gig we played with Gong, where Pip smashed up a whole tea service and about 6 gnomes. You can imagine how Daevid Allen felt about this. As the 4th or 5th gnome's head left its shoulders, a splinter of gnome material leapt up and gashed open Pip's foreheard, just above the eye. It bled quite a bit,and after the gig Daevid came up to him and said "well, smashing up gnomes and teapots - what do you expect?". Most of our gigs took place outside of Britain, with the emphasis on France and Holland. Richard's presence in the band helped endear us to the Dutch, who were Caravan-crazy. This caused problems once or twice when unscrupulous promoters actually billed us as "Caravan". In France, where Soft Machine and Gong were like deities, having Phil (who'd played with Robert Wyatt) and Pip Gong's drummer at the peak of their French popularity) in our ranks swiftly established us as a fixture in their maisons de la culture. We used to draw pretty good crowds and the French, especially,seemed to like us. Britain was, as usual, more difficult. Although the audiences could be great, gigs were always scarcer and less well paid than those in Europe.I am very happy with the two albums Hatfield put out, but I felt our live performances were inconsistent. This is perhaps inevitable if you include as much improvisation as we did, but from time to time the looseness and spontaneity would degenerate into a weak, amateurish performance that embarrassed me. This was nobody's fault, but there seemed to be a fragility to our group psyche. We'd go on stage confident, but then a monitor would start feeding back or something and we'd go to pieces. One such gig was the Rainbow Theatre farewell concert, where we played with a few other bands...although the track 'Halfway Between Heaven and Earth' was O.K. (it was recorded, with a new lead vocal added later, and was featured on the 'Over The Rainbow' compilation LP) the rest of the gig was terrible and we came off stage feeling really depressed. This happened more than was comfortable, and although we often went on to do a really steaming gig the next night, you never knew when the Duff Gig Phenomenon would strike again. Partly as a reaction to this, I began to write music for the band that was quite tightly controlled and scored. Though it was unlike their own music, the rest of the band were happy to have a go at it, and although it meant we had to rehearse a bit more, we started to include some of these more complex pieces in our live set. It was interesting to compare the difference of approach between my compositions and Richard Sinclair's - whereas my stuff was all written out and pre-arranged, Richard very rarely presented a finished song, preferring to play through a few chord sequences while he la-la'd a vocal tune. The band would throw in some arrangement ideas, and Pip might write some words, and finally (usually a few hours before a gig or recording session) the song would be completed. On paper, these two approaches were incompatible, but in practice they contrasted really well and gave the band some depth. Once our first album had been released (and not sold too brilliantly) we realised that we were never going to make any money out of the band. We had no manager, and somehow in the Virgin negociations we'd given away all our earning power by letting them recoup both our recording and writers' royalties against our recording debt. (Virgin, despite their initial hippie-ish appearance, soon became notorious in the industry for their unfair deals). So, all our recording income was being witheld by Virgin to set against a bill run up in the Manor studios, owned by... Virgin. Any gig money seemed to go on repairing the van or the P.A., both of which broke down regularly on alternate weeks. We were on the breadline, and no mistake. The person hit hardest by this was Richard (no, not Branson, stupid !). He and Pip both had families, but whereas Pip had wealthy parents who would occasionally bung him a bit of money or a gross of rusks, Richard had no financial cushion. We went to Virgin and pleaded with them to ease up a bit on the deal, at least release our publishing (ie writer') royalties so we could afford luxuries like food and rent. In a fit of unparalleled generosity which must have put a strain on their capital resources, they gave us all #50 a week for a whole month. Somehow though, despite this huge handout, we still contrived to stay poor - typical shiftless musicians.Though we managed to extricate our writers' royalties from 'The Rotters'Club' (the band's 2nd album) things were still desperate, and at one stage things got really serious for Richard - his wife had a 6 week old baby and they had nowhere to live. They stayed in a squat in Croydon for awhile, but got chucked out of there. For a time there was even the possibility that the kids might have to be taken into care; I don't remember the details, but it was pretty grim. Throughout this, Virgin's attitude remained the same. "If you want money", Carol Wilson, then head of Virgin Music, said to me, "you should get a proper job, like mine". Thanks, Carol. 'The Rotters' Club' sold little better than its predecessor, and given the incredibly bleak financial circumstances, it was small wonder that the group cracked up. There were other factors, too. We used to have a lot of rows, understandable if you look at our different personalities and how young we were. We all liked each other, but that didn't stop us having the odd screaming argument. Unfortunately, Richard would sometimes continue, or begin, the argument on stage, berating Pip for not listening to what he was playing or making a deliberately ugly noise on his bass instead of playing the bass line. This didn't happen much, but it disturbed me badly. I had this 'the show must go on somehow,even if we're all having brain seizures' attitude, which I felt was the least we could do for an audience who had paid good money to see us. When it became obvious that Richard's sporadic stage outbursts weren't going to stop, and that his difficult personal situation was making him increasingly disaffected with the music, I thought it was time to quit. Richard Branson asked me to start up a new Hatfield and the North with new musicians, since ironically there was some American interest in the band and Virgin had found an outlet over there. I told him no thanks; he evidently had no understanding of how a group works, and seemed to think I was the best bet out of the four of us because I was the "together" one who did the accounts. But there was no way any one of us could claim the band name, as like our slightly more successful predecessors The Beatles, we were very much a sum of the parts. I was in the band for two and a half years, from early 1973 to 1975. We did at least two BBC radio sessions for John Peel, a couple of French TV shows and had our awful gig at the Rainbow filmed. I only got to see this in 1988, in Tokyo, where some rabid Japanese fans had somehow unearthed the clip. It featured the same tune 'Halfway Between Heaven and Earth' featured on the 'Over The Rainbow' album, the only decent song of an abysmal set. I was amused to see the video Richard la-la-la-ing while his audio self sang a set of lyrics penned some time after the gig - the miracles of modern science, eh ! Modern day fans of Hatfield are always asking me if any gig tapes exist, and I'm sure there area few around which have ended up on bootleg cassettes etc, but basically the answer is "no". Pip had a very rough tape of two French gigs from which we selected 2 sections for inclusion on our retrospective 'Afters' compilation LP, but we all felt the rest of the material was naff. I don't know what happened to these tapes, and archivists will no doubt continue to torture themselves speculating, but there are no Hatfield and the North major compositions lying around unrecorded. Unlike National Health, the band that followed in the wake of these poverty-stricken days (which, looking back through the gnome dust, seem increasingly like a golden era) Hatfield and the North got to record all their favourite tunes. As a postscript to my Hatfield reminiscences, I should point out that I also did the following things while in the band : a) Rejoined my former Egg colleagues Mont Campbell and Clive Brooks to record 'The Civil Surface' b) Appeared as a guest (suitably depicted in Tibetan wooly hat) on FishHillage's 'Steve Rising' album, which made up a bit for Khan's premature demise c) Met Robert Wyatt - who used to be married to Pip's wife Pam - and played a concert with him at London's Drury Lane Theatre. Enjoyed the gig,but smashed my thumb during rehearsals fiddling with the hinged back part of Robert's Minimoog. Ouch! d) Met Alan Gowen, an extremely affable keyboard player who went on to become one of my best mates. At this time, he was living in Barnes, just up the road from Pip's flat in Sheen, and had got to know Phil and Richard. Alan had his own band Gilgamesh, and wrote a special 'double quartet' piece for them and Hatfield to co-perform at Leeds Art College (I think - where Alan's girlfriend Celia was an ex-student) and in London (can't remember where).Very enjoyable. When things started getting dodgy with Hatfield, Alan and I started muttering about how one day we would get a band together. That day arrived sooner than we anticipated - Hatfield played their last gig at 'The Winning Post' (huh) in Chertsey in 1975, and I set off back to the paddock to start plans for the new Stewart/Gowen supergroup, 'National Health'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------