Part 31: 1985
After one bitterly cold mornings work on the pig farm, I found myself with the rest of the band standing in the warmth of Richard Waghorn’s small mix down room, behind his 16 track mixing desk. We were listening back to a recording Justin, Steven and Nick had just made, and to me, it sounded utterly mesmerising.
I recently asked Justin to describe the guitar part technically and he said it was “a repetitive, muted guitar pattern that evolves and creates tension around a G minor.” And this is what drives the piece. At first it’s just the guitar alone, then it’s joined by the drums and then the bass comes in bringing a new energy. It stops and starts and rises and falls and rises again to a peak. All that it was missing was a vocal part.
Richard told me I could go anywhere I wanted to in the house to write, so I wandered off and ended up sitting at an antique table in a room with an oil painting in front of me. I got out my pen and note book and sat for an hour looking at them and listening to the rumbling sounds of that big old house until I realised I wasn’t going to write anything there, so I got up and went home.
I didn’t go into the tent I’d built in room we called The Flat, but sat next to a gas fire opposite and with the guitar part, coming and going, looping around in my head, I drifted back to the dream I’d had of the room in that great, decaying, industrial city and all it’s vastness in the night. The explosions from a blast furnace occasionally lighting up the sky and the outline of another person, standing at the window looking out.
Once I started writing it came all at once. It was like moving across radio airwaves and suddenly from all the confusion of noise hearing a voice very clearly for a few moments before it disappeared again into oblivion.
When I went back to the ’studio’ I felt I’d written something that was at least adequate, in fact I was excited, so as soon as I got there we rolled the tape, pressed ‘record’ and I read it. I finished the last words exactly in time with when the music built to it’s climax and then I stood there, alone… not sure about what had just happened.
As I walked into the mix down room Richard looked at me wide eyed and the others looked at me and uttered some muted words of cautious approval. Then we listened to what I’d done and it sounded… all right, maybe good. I went back and recorded another two versions but they didn’t align at all - only the first, instinctive take sounded right, so we went with it. Then we packed up the gear and left because we didn’t have anything else ready to record, but we were pleased about having at least the first two songs of what would become our second album recorded.
We called that song ’Slow Pulse Boy’ and it was to become the song that we are probably still best known for, 40 years later. Since then we have performed it at almost all of the 500 odd concerts we’ve played. I don’t get tired of it, partly because it’s never the same, but also, for me, it feels like there is always something more to discover or see, even if I can’t find it. I’m not sure how Justin feels, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t play it if he didn’t want to.
The cold weather went into February, I went to work wearing two pairs of trousers and had to shovel piles of shit, afterbirth and stillborn piglets that had frozen solid. Eventually there was a blizzard that not only blocked off the lane in and out of Morton Under Hill but even blocked off Inkberrow and the main road to Worcester. The blizzard continued into the night and was so fierce that Justin and I wore goggles with attached snorkels to keep the snow out of our eyes as we battled our way across the fields to the pub.
The storm passed in the night and the next morning there was a great silence and everything was still and white. The snow plough got through the next day but the cold lasted for almost the whole month. One day as I was carrying a bale of straw to the sty where the two huge boars were kept, I was suddenly surrounded by scores of fox hounds, followed by a huntsman who came charging through the yard in his scarlet jacket on a grey horse.
He blew his horn and galloped off with the hounds howling, just before the chaos of the rest of the hunt came flooding in, all in their black or red coats and black hats, men and women, young and old, swirling around me as if I wasn’t there. Then, with the thundering of horses hooves on the frozen ground, as suddenly as they had arrived, they were gone. Like creatures from another world.
There were times when, for me at least, going to play in London felt like visiting another world, and it was around this time that we played at ‘The Fulham Greyhound’ for the first time. It was a step up from the basement in the Clarendon and noticeably more people came to see us. The room was up a wooden staircase above the pub with a good sized stage and a better PA. The brief mention of this gig in my diary ends with the figure - £20. At first I thought this might have meant that we actually paid ourselves £20 each, but I now realise it was the net profit we made from the gig.
On another trip to London we met up with the creator of a popular and highly regarded Fanzine called ‘Abstract’ who wanted to feature us in their next edition. He interviewed us in a MacDonald’s and took photos of us by Cleopatras needle, the obelisk, by the Thames. ‘Maps in her wrists and arms’ was included on an accompanying 12” compilation vinyl along with tracks from ‘Swans’, ‘Test Dept’, ‘Colourbox’, ‘Cindy Talks’, ‘The Wolfgang press’ and other known bands. In the years that followed, free compilation CD’s became common practice but it was unusual at the time and our inclusion on this ‘Abstract’ publication introduced our music to a surprising amount of people.
When the first signs of spring started to show we drove out to the far side of a nearby town called Droitwich to see if we could get to what looked, from the distance of the main road, to be an abandoned mansion. Today Whitley court is owned by English Heritage, it’s signposted, easily reachable, has a carpark, it’s own website and naturally enough you have to pay to enter, but back then it was quite hard to get to and few people knew about it. It had been abandoned and nature, in its elegant but unforgiving way, had started to take over.
It was, and perhaps still is, a quite enchanting place, with a fascinating history. It had been partly decimated by a fire in the 1930s but most of it was still standing. There were spectacularly huge, dry and decaying, fountains in the gardens and picturesque gazebos. Our main motive for going was to take some photographs of ourselves there, but over the following years as our awareness and interest in the history and diversity of our surroundings grew we would visit Whitley Court often.
I see in the yellowing pages of my small 1985, ‘line a day’ diary, written in 2mm high print, the words - “Budge on tour with TVT”. Budge is what we called Steven and TVT is the acronym of ‘The Very Things’ who were a cool, creatively dynamic band who had morphed from the the best known punk band in the district ‘The Cravats’. They had recently appeared live on the TV show ‘The Tube’, were big favourites of John Peel and being on a slightly higher level than us were now touring in mainland Europe. We had become good friends and missing a bassist for live work they asked Steven if he would play with them on a short tour of The Netherlands and Germany. We had no idea at the time how significant this would be for the the rest of us, but it would lead to events that would change our lives forever.
(Written by SHJ)