Part 29: (1984…still)
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. The apples on the ancient trees behind the pond and the Dutch barn in Bone Orchard ripened and started to fall as I sat at my window opposite watching and answering fan mail. We spent a lot of time in The Dairy trying to write another song to accompany ‘Scarlet Arch’ on an EP and we signed on and off the dole hoping each time it’d be the last.
I started working mornings at a pig farm just outside the village for a farmer I knew from the pub. He was a dark, good looking, tough, heavy drinking man with piercing blue eyes and although we had almost nothing in common we liked each other. My other workmate there was a younger guy who had just come out of prison for almost killing someone at a local disco and barbecue.These acts of extreme violence in and around the local villages happen from time to time along with other stark and warped events that run like a dark and often unmentioned undercurrent through rural life.
For a change of scene and mood, some nights we would drive to Birmingham, to the art centres to see films - ‘Rumblefish’ and ’Bladerunner’ three or four times each. We got into Peter Greenaway films and went to see Michael Nyman playing at Coventry university. My sister and her husband Dr J who had advised and helped us build our equipment and form the band, emigrated to California leaving me their record collection; artists I’d never listened to before like Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane.
As the days got shorter and cooler it was easier to lock ourselves away and focus on music. And after some days or weeks, from all the cords and discords and 12 string acoustic notes and feedback and doubtful silences Justin came upon a refrain that sounded a bit like something from ‘Forever changes’ the classic album by ‘Love’ our elder brother used to play when we were children. At first it was just a chorus but the three of them worked out a verse section that gave it a quite specific, escalating energy.
It sounded great to me and I absolutely had to be a part of it. So I just half shouted and half sung along - anything that came into my head. Bizarrely, what came were moths, so I shouted about moths, in my hair and beating around my head as if it were a lightbulb or a flame.
Our audience in London had grown and were more openly receptive, so when we played at ‘The Clarendon’ for the last time we tried out our new song. I was still mainly shouting about moths but I’d given it the working title ’A room in Lucy’. The idea had come to me while writing to Alison in Bristol about my somewhat desperate need to write lyrics for a song but not knowing quite what to write about. Eventually it dawned on me that what I was looking for was right in front of me…or in that strange expanse that can develop between two correspondents who have never met and know next to nothing about each other.
Then in December we organised a gig at a pub in Malvern called ‘The Lamb’ and by then at least the chorus words “In Lucy lives a room” were written. All I remember about that event is standing in a street lined with houses and gardens at dusk and looking up the hill towards the pub. It had a warm glow about it in the fading light, with the leafless branches of trees hard and black against the sky and I was thinking it was a long way from Hammersmith Odeon where we had played six months earlier. I was no more or less nervous or excited as I knew that once we were on stage and the music had started that was all that mattered. My head was spinning though and I was wondering what was the connection between the moths and Lucy. It was the beginning of a flu I was going down with, a heavy one, with a high temperature and delirium.
When I’d recovered Chris drove us down to Southern Studio’s in North London. The EP we were about to record was an important one for our career as it was the follow up to the 1st album and we were starting to get noticed by the music press, so Chris was not remotely amused to find us all in different states of post all night party wreckage recovery mode. As was often the case, I’d taken on the dubious responsibility of being the most overindulgent person in the house and was still at least half in the land of the fairies as we passed over the Cotswold hills
There had been some kind of agreement that Robert (Smith) was going to come and take the role of producer but we were probably too casual about it and he must have forgotten. We did alright on our own though, in fact Justin discovered something that would actually turn out to be of great importance to him and us as a band in the future.
‘Scarlet arch’ was easy to record as we’d played it live a number times. The new song came together lyrically in my head on the journey down… I let the moths go and called it ‘A room lives in Lucy’ . The other song was a simple piece where Justin, Steven and Nick played in waltz time. I sang the words of an old, anonymous rhyme our grandmother used to narrate to us as children through a haze of cigarette smoke, called ‘There was a man of double deed’. And it was whilst recording this that Justin spontaneously played an accompanying guitar part in the style of a mandolin. It came quite naturally to him and we thought it added a nice touch.
SJ