Windsor festival remembered

The story begins with this bloke called ‘Ubi’, who, with his friend, Sid Rawle, ‘organised’ (I have to put that within inverted commas because there was very little organisation) the first Windsor Free Festival in 1972.

Although I had only just turned seventeen, both Ubi and Sid had been corresponding with me for some time, because of my interest in alternative politics, pirate radio, and publications such as International Times and Oz. They sent me lots of leaflets and tracts, which I later discovered were printed via the photocopiers of the Civil Service for whom Ubi worked during the day. He was an evening anarchist.

These one page leaflets seemed extraordinarily exotic to me, often printed on pink paper, and containing bizarre stories of UFOs, London squats, and police activity in Notting Hill.

They always had this odd address at the top of the badly typewritten pamphlets, “BM – Circle” with a Holborn postcode. It all felt like a million miles away from suburban Middlesex.

When Ubi sent me one of his short, unusual letters, accompanied by a page of scrawled information about the free festival he was putting together in Windsor, it only took a few moments of persuasion to encourage three of my friends to agree to come along to this oasis of anarchy, about ten miles from our home town.

We travelled in an incredibly decrepit ex-Post Office van, which had been rather randomly painted with yellow gloss, but miraculously it had a ‘state of the art’ cassette player. As we only had one cassette (Creedence Clearwater Revival), choice of music was rather limited. I remember the van had no seats in the back, and have a vivid memory of arriving at Home Park in Windsor, and tumbling out of the back doors with a lurching sense of nausea, having spent twenty minutes rolling about in the back of the van. I remember Datchet, in particular, had very windy, bumpy roads.

The light was already fading, and we headed towards where we could hear the noise. As we got closer to the source, we realised that the noise was actually the generator mixed in with the sound of (I think) the Pink Fairies. There was almost no lighting around the area, apart from that provided by some sensible hippies who had brought candles.

In my memory, each band that clambered on to the rudimentary stage blurred into each other. The generator broke down approximately every ten minutes. As night fell, people succumbed to the effects of alcohol and ‘substances’, and there was a sense of confusion, only lightened by the continual shouts for ‘Wally’, who never seemed to be found.

(There is a whole story waiting to be written on the ‘Wally’ phenomenon of the early 1970s).

I was a bit scared.

The music became incidental. People were walking around in a rather random way. Some people lit bonfires and were breaking branches from trees to use as fuel.

Nobody was in charge; there was no source of information, no toilets, no water, no food, and no shelter.

The four of us decided to camp amidst the trees of Home Park; that is, camp in the sense of lying down on the damp grass and trying to sleep under the stars. We had no tent or sleeping bags. I had my aspiring-to-be-a-hippy greatcoat, but quickly discovered there wasn’t that much great about it when it came to keeping out the late summer chill in Berkshire.

We couldn’t sleep. It was cold and damp. People were acting oddly, stumbling around like so many extras, under fire, in a Vietnam War movie. I had never experienced anything like this before.

I don’t remember which of us finally had the courage to suggest we might head back to the sanctuary of the van, and return homewards, but I do recall that there was no need for discussion. I was up and ready to go in a second. How we found the van I have no idea, but I was really grateful to be rolling around in the back as we cornered and bumped our way back through Datchet.

It must have been about four o’clock in the morning when I returned home. I sat in a boiling hot bath for about an hour, just to try and regain the feeling in my frozen arms and legs.

Next weekend, I will be back in Home Park again. Years go by, and our lives take twists and turns. I am no longer a part-time hippy with waist length hair and patchouli oil behind my ears.

I’ll be attending the Royal Windsor Horse Show, but as I sip my coffee, and watch the show jumping, I might just close my eyes for a moment, and concentrate really hard. Just in case I can hear if anyone is still shouting out for Wally. I hope and pray I don’t hear the distant sound of Hawkwind and the spluttering of a generator. I’d be scared all over again.

Terence Dackombe, May 2010

Awards and rewards

If you enter the search term ‘music awards’ in Google, you receive just short of fifty-two million results; there’s your Grammy, your BRITS, sharing the space alongside the Bulgarian Music Awards, and the Canadian Inuit Music Awards.

Wikipedia will serve you up with seventy-six pages of music awards, literally from A-Z, the Acedémie Charles Cros to the Zimbabwe Awards.

The awards season, until a few short years ago, was squeezed into the first couple of months of the year. Now, however, they are a never ending loop of the calendar, a year round bonanza, and frankly, with so many of them, if you don’t win something, somewhere, you really should consider giving up. Or simply organise your own awards ceremony.

In the week that I am writing this, London hosted one of the more well known prize-giving ceremonies for the great and the good (and the not so good). Having attended a few of these in my time, I can reveal that you generally sit at a table with a lot of people you don’t know, watching prizes being presented by people of whom you have never heard, to musicians whose music you’re fairly sure you don’t want to hear.

For the event I refer to, you would only have been required to stump up £300 for your seat* at the table (oh, plus VAT, of course) – why didn’t you go?

*By the way, with one thousand seats available, that’s not a bad earner, is it?

If you wanted to propose your act for one of the prize categories, then I will have to ask you to throw in another £75 per entry (plus VAT). You thought acts were judged on their merits? Only after you’ve handed over that 75 quid. If you’re not sure how to pitch, there are plenty of people who will do it for you.

So why do these prize parades exist? What is their purpose? To celebrate the very best in musicianship? To pay tribute to a breathtaking, innovative, ground-breaking piece of music?

Or are they an enormous marketing opportunity, to feed more opiate to the masses, as pop eats itself on a bed of rocket, drizzled with a lavender jus?

Every artist, without exception, who appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in 2009, saw “significant” increased sales, beginning during ‘VMA Weekend’ and continuing upwards through the following week. Muse, who had not appeared on TV in America before, saw their album go straight in to the Billboard chart at #3 (128,000 copies sold), and their ‘Uprising’ single saw a week-on-week growth in sales of 341%.

Following the BRITS in February 2010, the Head of Music at HMV reported that, in the following week, Robbie Williams’ album sales grew by 150%, Florence and the Machine by 140%, with the ‘lowest’ sales growth shown by Lily Allen with a not-to-be-sniffed-at 50%.

Yet, do not believe, for one moment, that this is all a cynical, under the table, aspect of the whole awards ‘business’ (and it is a business). Many of the websites associated in promoting these endless ceremonies are quite open about the sales opportunities provided by a nomination. The ‘Independent Music Awards’ even has a video on its testimonial page illuminating the promotion, and unit processing prospects, available to nominees and winners.

Whether winning such an award in contemporary times is simply a case of the emperor’s new clothes being nominated for best dressed autocrat, or whether taking a prize is a glittering coat of many colours to reward for an outstanding artistic achievement, is simply in the eye, and ear, of the beholder.

Of one thing, we can be sure: today’s award ceremonies will never match the brevity of the NME Awards of the 1960s. No speeches in 1964, just Roger Moore handing over gongs to the Disc Jockey of the Year, David Jacobs, bless him, and the best group award to... who else? Even they were given time only to do some gurning, and a give a wave or two.

Terence Dackombe April 2010

London simmering

The music scene in mid 1970s London was rather moribund. The glam era had got spots from ripping off the stars from its face, and the unknown Mick Jones & Tony James were practising in a tiny room in Paddington, still a year or two away from fateful meetings with Bernie Rhodes and Paul Simonon. About a hundred yards away from their den, I was working as a booker at a middling London Rock/Pop/Theatrical/Anything agency, in Praed Mews. This tiny side street was an amazing warren of houses, garages, and workshops. You could walk along corridors that led from one zigzagging set of rooms to another, with no obvious end in sight. Polish bookbinders (many with tattooed numbers on their wrists), worked side by side with brawny Irishmen scrubbing up brass kettles to sell on to naive tourists in Portobello Road. In amongst this industrious hive, we shared a floor with a television artists management company, who ‘looked after’ a varying array of talent, but largely made up of people like the harmonica playing bloke who dashed on to the Morecambe & Wise Show, only to be told, “Not now Arthur!” before being hustled off the stage.

Most days, a singer called Irene Carroll, dressed in furs regardless of the weather, would sweep in, arm-in-arm with an older man. About an hour later, they would swish out again, and leave in a gaudy limo, with the driver delicately negotiating his way out of the tiny mews. Most of our income was generated by leeching acts from other more well known agencies, and trying to flog the then unknown Cockney Rebel & Queen (for £175.00) to reluctant college social secretaries the length of Britain. (For more on this, listen to Word Podcast 96)

Our agency still had a deep well of acts that had been regulars, twenty years previously, on the Music Hall circuit, and despite television, The Beatles and Psychedelia leaving them behind on a cultural desert island, these artists would drop in, with the vain hope that some gig had been found for them at some long forgotten Gaumont or Variety Theatre. Thus would Hilda & Her Performing Poodles (I could write a thousand words on her act alone), Frank Strong (“You can never go wrong, with a smile and a song” ran Frank’s business card), and the bloke who sculpted elephants out of balloons, rubbed shoulders with, say, The Doobie Brothers, or Tower of Power, over on a tour, and picking up their itineraries and daily allowances. Transatlantic travel was still rather rare in those days, and to find Hilda (who had a close resemblance to Esma Cannon from the Carry On films) in a tricky conversation with a Californian sax player was a wonder to behold.

As a very junior 19 year old, it was my job to look after Hilda and her peers, and also to book out the agency’s stable of folk acts. This was never going to make me a fortune as the agency received ten per cent of the fee, and I received twenty-five per cent of that ten per cent. As most folkie acts were lucky to get twenty five quid, I would receive the less than handsome reward of just over sixty pence for each gig I booked.

The best way to get a folk/blues/acoustic musician some exposure and higher fees was to try and convince a mainstream act to give the aspiring muso a support spot. This worked really well if I teamed up Gordon Giltrap with the Fairports, but what possessed me to get Dave Ellis a support slot with... wait for it... The Edgar Broughton Band, at the Rainbow Theatre, is still a mystery to me today. At the time, Dave, a very quiet, calm, folk musician with an amazing guitar style, was used to playing in candlelit folk clubs, often the ‘back room’ of pubs. The Broughtons, after an introspective period, were about to sign to NEMS, and so we promoted a showpiece gig at the Rainbow. Ticket sales were slow; I pulled on some favours from Capital Radio, where I had worked, and Nicky Horne plugged the gig on his ‘Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It’ show. We pretended to give away a pair of tickets to a caller to his show, but in fact I dropped off fifty pairs of tickets and all callers were ‘winners’.

I’m not sure if Dave has ever forgiven me, for placing him in an environment where his gentle acoustic playing was somewhat overshadowed by confused Capital Radio listeners, and straggle haired hippies yelling “Out Demons Out!” I remember speaking with Dave, in the wings of the Rainbow, after his set. He seemed even quieter than usual...

I think this mad moment of ‘artist placement’ was one of my final activities in Praed Street, before I left and decamped to Mallorca for the summer. But that story is for another day...

Terence Dackombe, 2009

5live's Sony Award

The Radio Academy Awards boasts more judges than reunion night at the Old Bailey. The list of names reaches the lengths of a telephone directory. When they sit around the table to discuss the Sony Awards, they need megaphones to communicate their opinions. I understand that Trevor Dann uses semaphore flags to indicate when it’s time for a tea break.

Since the (leaked) announcement of the Award for UK Station of the Year on Monday, there has been criticism in some corners of the media, based on the view that 5 Live is a station in transition and thus not fully eligible for the receipt of an award that encompasses a year of achievement. Yet it is this very point that reinforces the judgement.

After the Wogan-Evans-Mayo-Bacon moves, it would have been understandable if 5 had seen a significant downturn in both confidence and RAJAR audience statistics. That the station has sounded refreshed and renewed is a tribute to the measured evolution that controller Adrian Van Klaveren has overseen during his two years in the post. The loss of Simon Mayo in particular, was a heavy blow, but the move of Richard Bacon to the afternoon slot has been astute, as his eccentric but sharp style has meant that the enormous hole in the schedule has been filled with a personality to soften the impact.

Van Klaveren uses the Sir Alex Ferguson style of maintaining a winning team by mixing the older, more experienced members of the squad with a sprinkling of new, youthful talent (perhaps not quite so youthful in terms of the placement of Tony Livesey in the late night slot). The controller also deserves much credit for allowing presenters who have made a rather shaky start, the time to gain experience and grow into the job.

Currently, 5 live sounds confident, energetic and solid. Unlike Radio Four, where programmes are usually bigger than the presenters, 5 live relies heavily on the personality of each of its team to underpin the diversity of the programming.

Significant contributions to 5’s success begin with the breakfast combination of the outstanding Shelagh Fogarty, and Nicky Campbell, who in recent years has loosened the collar of self regard and has almost become rather self effacing.

In the afternoon, Richard Bacon’s quirky manner belies a razor sharp intelligence and a delightful honesty. Bacon has the enviable talent of putting his guests at ease as soon as he interacts with them.

5 live Drive brings the droll charms of veteran Peter Allen, usually paired with Anita Anand, but whilst the latter has been away on maternity leave, Aasmah Mir has proved an outstanding find. Her lively Scottish tone keeping even Peter Allen on his toes – they work splendidly as a team, with mutual respect and warmth very evident.

The re-hiring of Danny Baker (long overdue) is perhaps Adrian Van Klaveren’s most farsighted signing, for Danny has a unique style in reaching out to listeners.

5 live richly deserves its award, and with its outstanding coverage of the recent General Election, and the World Cup to come, it could even be a smart move to bet on 5 retaining the title in 2011.

Terence Dackombe May 2010

Sell, sell, sell

‘Aint playing for Pepsi/ Aint Playing for Coke’.

In his song ‘This Note’s For You’, the sainted Neil Young objects, in no uncertain terms, to his fellow musicians accepting sponsorship from corporations or allowing their tunes to be used in commercials. Good for you, Neil.

Personally, I’m a little more relaxed about this sort of horse trading. It’s all about context really. BBH’s work for Levis in the early 1980s seemed to transcend advertising, using a mixture of classic music and iconic imagery to produce mini, zeitgeist defining movies. And all those tracks roared up the hit parade as a result – arguably introducing a whole new generation to the work of Percy Sledge, T-Rex, Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. No bad thing. Pot Noodle’s use of the unrivalled ‘Ace of Spades’ was another rock/advert high point, but persuading The Clash to sell jeans is still causing me an ideological crisis twenty odd years later.

No, I’d say the whole thing only really comes unstuck when songs get re-recorded and the lyrics re-written. The current Pringles spot moves me to both tears and tooth gnashing as it replaces the rather lovely bump and grind of Positive Force’s ‘We Got The Funk’ with the sickly and sanitized refrain ‘We Got The Fun’. And this has been going on since Coke rewrote ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’ back in the 70s.

Fortunately for ad agencies, there are literally millions of options when selecting the perfect recording for the soundtrack to their latest, baked bean punting spectacular. Granted, a few tunes are off limits – notably The Beatles catalogue – but on the whole, if your client is prepared to stump up the readies, most songwriters will give the nod for their work to appear in an ad (unless they happen to be Neil Young, of course). There’s been a trend for advertisers to option a track before its release as it tends to cost less before it’s a hit. Those with no budget at all can even opt for music deemed ‘public domain’ – a nursery rhyme, for example.

So, it is somewhat surprising to see the same old numbers used over and over to sell almost

anything you can put a name to. As I write, Blur’s ‘Song 2’ is being used in a motor car

campaign for the umpteenth time, for goodness sake.

Now, what is the second most used track in UK advertising history? Fancy a guess?

It’s ‘What A Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong, showing up in no fewer than nine

spots for outfits as diverse as Microsoft and Redrow Homes.

Hot on its heels you’ll find ‘It Must Be Love’ – interestingly it tends to be the Madness

cover of Labi Siffre’s song which is preferred – tied with Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’

at six ads each.

Next on the list? Depeche Mode’s ‘I Just Can’t Get Enough’ (rather than ‘Personal Jesus’, note) with five commercials from The Sun, Tropicana, T-Mobile and others.

I could go on like this for some time, but for those as nerdy about these things as I am, you can find the full top ten here: http://www.uktvadverts.com

But hang on, if you were paying attention, you’d have noticed I started at number two. Which begs the question: ‘What is the numero uno of the ad music chart?’ Well, it’s something called Special Composition – that is, music specifically written for the ad by a professional songwriter for hire. And if the big beasts of commerce are to avoid offending music purists, they’ll need to stick to those Special Compositions. It would, at least, save Neil Young a lot of sleepless nights.

Magnus Shaw, March 2010