And Also The Trees by Simon Huw Jones
To mark the 40th anniversary of ‘And also the trees’ we asked singer Simon Huw Jones to write some words and show some pictures about the bands early years.
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To mark the 40th anniversary of ‘And also the trees’ we asked singer Simon Huw Jones to write some words and show some pictures about the bands early years.
We consider the birth of ‘And also the trees’ to be our first live performance which was on January 12th 1980 in Alcester, Warwickshire.
In 1978, when he was 14, Justin bought a second hand acoustic guitar and started teaching himself how to play it.
It wasn’t just about getting into punk rock music; we cut off our long hair and wore narrow, ‘drainpipe’ trousers and this, remarkably, was enough to completely set us appart, to make us different…
Our first song was called ‘Lies’, a basic punk thrash with me chanting “Always telling me lies” in the chorus.
The advent of Punk rock is often referred to as ‘the punk explosion’ and it’s a good description. By 1979 the dust had settled and the creative atmosphere was like an uneasy calm after the storm.
As 1979 progressed we dropped the name ‘Control’ and toyed with other ideas but nothing stuck.
One afternoon in late November 1979 we had a meeting at the Havas house to decide on a name for the band.
In December 79 we heard that a local new wave band were looking for support acts for a gig they were putting on in aid of the Cambodia fund in Alcester a small town about six miles away from us just over the county border in Warwickshire.
On January 12th 1980 ‘And also the trees’ played live for the first time. We think of this as the beginning, the day ‘And also the trees’ became a real band.
After that first gig all we wanted was to play live again. We thought that maybe if we made a vocal PA we could be self sufficient, hire out places and put gigs on ourselves or play in the back rooms of pubs.
Our second live performance was at a Young Farmers Pig roast and Disco. As it was just the other side of Inkberrow, about 2 miles away, we decided not to hire a van but to drive all our equipment there in my mini clubman.
We worked on new songs in Justin’s bedroom and spent many hours renovating ‘the dairy’ - replacing the old floor boards, bricking up the windows and fireplace and doing our best to soundproof it - we even made a new heavy duty door.
I was in the Old Bull Inn one night with Graham standing at the bar when a friend came in and said there had been an announcement on Ann Nightingale’s BBC Radio 1 show that Fiction records wanted to urgently get in touch with a band called ‘And also the trees’.
We consider the birth of ‘And also the trees’ to be our first live performance which was on January 12th 1980, our first year, was drawing to a close.
As 1981 progressed we finished renovating and soundproofing our rehearsal room ‘The Dairy’. We also called it ‘The void’ as the peaceful old room with its boxes of wrinkled apples and sleeping cats was now a totally characterless whitewashed box... an obvious outcome we hadn’t considered until it was too late.
Towards the end of November 1981 we took our equipment down to London and dropped it off for transportation with The Cure’s road crew who didn’t know wether to laugh or cry as we unloaded what looked like a van load of stuff that had come straight off the film set of ‘Out of Africa’…
In the last days of 1981 we had a recording session at The Playground Studio in Camden, London. I’m still not sure how this happened, who paid for it and why… but Robert (Smith) organised it with the producer Mike Hedges who was thinking about starting up his own record label…
I was very proud about being able to say that I was in an underground rock band. Along with saying ‘I play for Aston Villa football club’ which by now I had conceded was unlikely, it was about the coolest thing I could possibly think of. I didn’t want to be a rock star, there was something a bit brazen or overblown about all that in my opinion - I wanted to be in a band that normal people had never heard of…
One afternoon when we were in The Playground Studios’ Siouxsie walked into the control room. She had come to see Robert Smith and Mike Hedges who were mixing ‘From Under The hill’ with us so they got up and spoke with her and Steven Severin, who was with her, leaving us in stunned silence not knowing where to look.
When we walked into the venue called The Asylum in Nottingham all the signs were positive…
One afternoon in September 1983 we went to the ‘Future Records’ office in Malvern and signed a record contract.
Shantell was released in September 1983. We were pleased with it, it was a simple song but had depth, it was well recorded and produced and it didn’t sound like anyone else.
Having already recorded six of the songs to go on our album before, recording them again with Lol Tolhurst and David Motion in Southern Studios was easy enough…
At the end of winter we drove down to London to record our John Peel session in the famous BBC Maida Vale studios..…
The summer got warmer, too warm for football, so we got out an old cricket bat and tennis ball and using a fruit crate for a wicket we played cricket in the yard instead…
October 1st, the day when we were supposed to have decided if we were to continue as a band or split up and find ourselves sensible jobs came and went without ceremony.