So Serious

Note: This is a flashback, nostalgic post that has nothing to do with my new diary series. The next post in December will hopefully be part 3 of that ongoing diary.

A few years ago, I wrote a very brief post and a recording about an album that I was involved in making. It was a live recording of a short-lived traditional jazz band.  It was the final gig of a quintet who used to play at the Golden Fleece public house in Wells-next-the-Sea.  I played keyboards and was 24 years old at the time. In the post, I made an ever briefer reference to a slightly earlier album that I recorded. With some self-deprecation, I stated that most of it was not very good and is ‘sixth form poetry at best’. However, as the 30th anniversary of this previously unreleased album has come around, I thought I would share it for the first time. It’s a bit of light relief, despite the album title, from my other recent and upcoming posts.

A review of ‘Aladdin’ in the Eastern Daily Press, 11 January 1991

I have always been a bit of a writer and performer. As a child, I made up loads of songs and also tried my hand at acting. I used to attend Pimlico School, near Westminster, on Saturdays for singing and drama classes. I was Joseph in school productions of ‘The Nativity’ and the mischief maker, Pau-Puk Keewis, in Hiawatha. At the age of 9, I performed a metronomic dance at the Purcell Rooms on London’s South Bank. When I was 15, I performed a song called ‘My Favourite Yard‘ at Holt Hall, Norfolk, as well as a magic trick on a drama week with some schoolfriends. As a 19/20 year old, I appeared in two amateur dramatic productions at my secondary school, ‘Virtue Triumphant’ and ‘Aladdin’ (see above photo). At home I composed stuff on the piano, but with song titles like ‘Down In The Dumps’ and ‘Suicide’, I seemed a bit pessimistic and depressed in my outlook, to say the least! Our dog, Brandy, would howl every time I played. I wasn’t sure if he was ‘singing’ along or complaining! As you probably know, I’ve written and recorded parody songs, too, and I’m not averse to a bit of karaoke – often singing Hotel California or Englishman in New York.

My cassettes with demo songs recorded between 1991-93.

During October – November 1993, having written around 20 songs in a two year period between 1991-1993, I selected a few that I would record using my mum’s piano, a Yamaha 1980s PSS-270 synthesizer electronic keyboard and a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder (see photos below), along with three cover versions. I used a single input microphone and cassette tape only. Very basic technology. This means that although the songs are mixed into stereo from 4 separate tracks, the quality is not particularly great. But it does highlight my piano playing, which at the time was as good as it was ever going to get. The album and title track were named as a tongue-in-cheek dig at my own gloomy character at the time.

Short diary entries from April 1991, including composing ‘Nothing You Can Lose’ on 13 April that year. In hindsight, it is probably the worst thing on the album, however. I don’t have any diary entries for the year 1993.

This has been my recent project in between going into hospital for an operation and further (MRI, PET-CT) scans this past week. Talking of ‘scans’, I’ve raided my photo albums and found some pics from around that time, including one of me playing ‘I Can See Clearly Now‘ at the Maltings, Wells Centre on this month 30 years ago, which I decided to make the new album cover. The songs might not have aged particularly well, but it has now been partly ‘remastered’ with new vocals, recorded this month, to complement the 30 year old ones. Some are the originals with no alterations. One has been constructed from three different versions and has video, too. The typed lyrics, where they exist, are scans from the master cassette tape.

Yamaha 1980s PSS-270 synthesizer (not my photo)

A Tascam 4-track Cassette Recorder that was used to produce the album
(not my photo)

Track listing – with short descriptions below. The video has time stamps on YouTube for each track so you can go straight there if needed.

1. (How can anyone be) So Serious (remastered) starts at 00:00
2. Life’s Rendezvous (remastered) starts at 02:37
3. You’re Never Gonna Forgive Yourself (remastered) starts at 09:23
4. Nothing You Can Lose (remastered) starts at 14:52
5. Vigil (remastered) starts at 18:56
6. I Can See Clearly Now (remastered) starts at 24:13
7. Been So Long (remastered) starts at 28:42
8. Washing of the Water (video, remastered) starts at 32:22
9. Piece of Cake (remastered, with Louise Eaglen) starts at 36:36
10. Love Me Tender (original with Bob Parker) starts at 42:34
11. Life’s Rendezvous (original demo) starts at 45:40
12. I Can See Clearly Now (original with Bob Parker) starts at 52:35

---

1. The title track was supposed to be a sort of New Order homage with deadpan delivery. The band had released ‘Republic’ that year and I try some Bernard Sumner type phrasing on this. It was the very first thing I recorded with my Yamaha PSS-270 synthesizer electronic keyboard – a birthday present earlier that year. Nowhere near as sophisticated as anything by that band, though. As I indicated already, the title was a dig at myself, being a bit of a deep thinker and taking life a bit too seriously.

2. In my view, the best track on the album and the song I was proudest of. It contains the best of a rum batch of lyrics and the recording was enhanced greatly by Robert Tuck’s electric guitar playing. I’ve always been a fan of good timing and that is the general theme here. I referenced Freddie Mercury’s death and how, knowing he was dying of AIDS, wrote about his demise. Something that both David Bowie and Leonard Cohen famously later did. One of the original demo versions is also included later on.

3. Originally track 9 on the album and drawing on a true story where I witnessed a little girl halfway up and on the outside of a tower block in East London, I felt this one deserved to be higher up the order, especially due to the rhythm on the ‘train’ verse and the final couplet. I’ll dedicate this to Amanda Wooff, who liked it when I played it to her 30 years ago, became a train driver herself and has been injecting me this past week with blood thinner following my recent operation.

4. Actually dates from 13 April 1991 (see diary photo), so it was written when I was 20. At the time I thought it was great. But in retrospect, it is naïve and whiney. Anyone else would be totally embarrassed to share this publicly as it has quite possibly the worst lyrics of all time!! Still, it was an opportunity to try and improve it recently, duetting with my 22 year-old self!

5. An odd song, which I don’t remember much about writing. I refer to taking insulin tablets, which is poetic licence as I’ve never been a diabetic. Unfortunately, the music has been supressed somewhat here as I couldn’t get the input to be clear enough. So the vocals are high in the mix by comparison.

6. This version of the Johnny Nash song owes more to the Hothouse Flowers version released a few years before this. I played this and a few other tunes at a 24 hours music marathon at the Maltings, the old Wells Centre, in the same month – see the album cover. A quicker version recorded with Bob Parker, who turns 80 this month, which was the one used on the original album, is included at the end.

7. Another oddity. About my best school friend, who I once saw working in the Stiffkey Red Lion pub the year before. Rubbish, 6th form lyrics, again. The accidental clicking noise that sounds like a typewriter was left on because we both took typewriting class at school!

8. The original album included my first attempt to cover Peter Gabriel’s song from ‘Us’, which was released in 1992. I have since recorded this on two other occasions. Firstly at the Priory clinic in Chelmsford in 2012 and then again in 2022 when I was a DJ on a closed Facebook group called ‘#Nightshift’. The video shows a mixed version of all three recordings, fading in and out, and ending with an accidental ‘Nothing Compares 2U‘ video nod as the outside light gets switched off at the clinic. The CD only has the original version from 1993. The title ‘So Serious‘ was partly a dig at my own gloomy character, but partly recycled an earlier Gabriel album title. Note: he did the same recently with a new track ‘So Much‘ from the album ‘i/o’ – which is released on 1 December.

9. A throwaway, jokey thing, recorded with Louise, my girlfriend at the time. I wrote out the lines and then we tried not to laugh saying them out loud. There are no lyrics in the video. Listening back to this, the instrumental piano section in the second half has some melodic elements of Elton John’s ‘Your Song‘, which I used to play, too, and is arguably better than what goes before, I feel. Includes a significant chord change, too, as the recording speeds up, which I was quite content with at the time.

10. An instrumental and synthetic reading of the Presley classic, with a bit of Bob Parker on guitar and some cheesy sounds in the background. Note the pre-programmed Yamaha 80s keyboard finish. The Presley song title ‘It’s Now or Never’ can be found in the lyrics for ‘Life’s Rendezvous’ (see image below). I am not particularly a fan of Presley, so not sure how this ended up the record. Maybe it was Bob’s idea as he already knew the chords.

‘Love Me Tender’ is in my book of chords from that time

Newly created CDs (already on eBay for 5 pence) with the lyrics of ‘Life’s Rendezvous’ on the reverse + A Piece of Cake

Conclusion

Putting this all together again has been fun and a useful distraction from health concerns and hospital visits. But seriously… be kind! You might conclude that it should have stayed unreleased, but I was quite the sensitive guy in my early 20s. My other demos are seriously bad, while some of the other covers I recorded are not too bad – Crowded House and an E.P. of Leonard Cohen songs called ‘Take This’ (because Take That were popular at this time and it comes from the title of his 1988 song, ‘Take This Waltz’). I doubt whether I will ever record anything ever again and that is probably a good thing, but I will carry on documenting my life. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy editing and a lot of videos showcasing this can be found on the tab at the ‘Videos / Films / Recordings‘ top. Thank for you reading to the end and, in some cases, suffering!

I’ll write again in December.

At Longwell Records in Bristol, during a visit earlier this year.
It works just as well as a verb than a noun. Photo by Haz.

---