Part 28: (1984 continued…)
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. When our conscience got the better of us, or we got too hot, we would shut ourselves back up in The Dairy with it’s bricked up windows and strip light and try to focus on making music.
Justin’s left hand wandered up and down the neck of his guitar making shapes instinctively, experimenting with pedals, trying to avoid the obvious. Steven and Nick followed, refusing to just play along and yield to the predictable. But we were still novices, musically uneducated and trying to find our way. We didn’t really know what we were doing.
As for me - I was totally out of my depth. My life, at that point, felt as though it was in the balance, I had the fragile self confidence of a healthy, reasonably good looking, not unpopular young man, but creatively I was lost and when eventually a piece of music that excited us did emerge, none of my vocal attempts sounded any good. A few days later Steven came to the rehearsal with an idea for a simple vocal melody and we decided to work with it. I was grateful, but having failed to find a part myself, I knew that in order to prove I wasn’t completely useless I had to write some lyrics that were at least usable.
In the evenings I would often go to The Dolphin, a pub in a neighbouring village, with my girlfriend throughout most of the 80’s called Angela. She was a marvellous girl who introduced me to the works of Dylan Thomas and Scott Walker and a lot of the literature that would influence me we discovered together. We all had girlfriends and naturally enough they shaped our lives and consequently the existence and development of ‘And Also The Trees’. Some became like an extension of the band and they helped and gave a lot.
On other nights Justin and I would walk the mile up Morton Under Hill lane, which was lined with ageing apple trees and cow parsley, to Inkberrow and The Old Bull. For financial reasons we would arrive shortly before last orders, quickly quench our raging thirsts by downing a pint of cold, very average lager, which always tasted truly fantastic, and then order another one which we made last until we were thrown out.
When the pubs had closed, 11 o’ clock officially in those days, when the Peel show ended, at midnight, and all the TV channels had shut down for the night, the world seemed very silent and still. Full of self doubt I found it increasingly difficult to sleep and sat up reading Albert Camus, struggled my way thought Jean Paul Sartre, found Kerouac and scratched the surface of the Beat Generation. I smoked hundreds of cigarettes, and anything else I could get my hands on, and often lay awake until dawn.
In this state, with it’s heightened highs and lows, I discovered that although certain drugs were definitely responsible for opening up my mind in a positive way, anything I wrote whilst under the direct influence of alcohol or drugs went directly into the bin in the morning, usually torn up in very small pieces. However, I also found that in the moments just as my mind started to drift into sleep - or in the rare moments when it was especially clear - some words started to come to me… it was as if they weren’t really my words, but they weren’t anyone else’s either, so I wrote them down and adapted them to Steven’s vocal melody. We called that song ’Scarlet Arch’ and were relieved and overjoyed at having something new to play.
Future records overreached, got into difficulties and changed it’s name to ‘Reflex records’. We were one of the bands they continued working with - in fact it was clear we had become their favourites and in their own guarded way they gave us a lot of encouragement. And on top of that, our first fan mail started to arrive at their office and this had a huge impact on us... particularly me.
Sometimes it was just people saying how much they liked our album or a gig and wanted to be informed about future events and releases. Then there were other, longer, letters where people described how the music made them feel, how it animated their imagination and took them out of themselves. It meant a lot to us to know these things. They asked questions about lyrics and I answered them and correspondences quickly started to develop.
I sat on an old wicker chair that was on the verge of disintegration at my bedroom window with a wooden tray on my lap and now, instead of looking from the blank page of my notebook to the pond across the lane with it’s moorhens and the reflection of the dutch barn behind it, and back to the blank page again, I started writing… to Alison in Bristol, Hassni in South London… to anyone that wrote to us. When we’d written all we could think of writing about our album and two singles we wrote about other things… where we were, where we’d rather be… anything. What was important to me was that I was writing.
Around this time we had our first interview, with a photograph, in a national music paper. I think it was ‘Sounds’, and was with Johnny Waller who must have seen us at The Clarendon in London. We’d featured in local press before and more importantly fanzines which were an important part of the underground scene. Interviews with fanzines like ‘Grim Humour’ were fun as it was just chatting with music fans so we felt on the same level, but talking to a music journalist was different - we wanted to make a good impression.
The part of the interview that was highlighted was where I spoke about spending an excessive amount of our adolescence in the village bus shelter because there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. We were bored, we loved music - so we fantasised about forming a band. It was true, but it wasn’t exactly how we wanted to be presented to world. What the hell else was there to say though?.
SHJ