01 — Plastic Surgery
- Steve Chowne — Vocals, Keys, Viola, Flute, Random stuff
- Tush Hamilton & Richard George — Guitars
- Clodagh Keane & Jo Keizer — Vocals
- Mike Salamy & John Martin — Violins
- Bill Crowther — Tenor Sax
- Duncan Jackman — Bass
- Gavin Bryan — Drums
- Robin Nagy — Cello, Photography, Crowd Noises
- Richard Conroy, Ben Gardener, Phillipa Havill, Rob Leather, Kelli Wilken — Crowd Noises
- Keith Murray & Sharon Clare — Vocals & Chat
- Chris Green — Sound Engineering
- John Gibb — Artwork
On the back of having a bit of fun with Out in the Air, Chris and I decided to record a studio album. “Studio” is over-selling it. The University Radio Bath studios comprised two rooms, each the size of a downstairs toilet under the stairs. On the upside, the studio suite could be used for free. As one of the radio station engineers, Chris could schedule access whenever it was available. The two rooms were glass-partitioned for monitoring, and the studios were stuffed full of broadcast and recording equipment, microphones, headphones, stands and leads. On the downside, it really was very pokey, old-fashioned and typically only free late at night. We musicians and engineers love a challenge.
By this time, I had acquired Freddy the 4-Track on which we were starting to capture all sorts of bits and bobs so that we didn’t have to do everything live and simultaneously. This was just as well, as it really was tricky to squeeze everyone into the studio simultaneously. It didn’t stop us trying sometimes. Chris mastered combinations of the 4-Track and live performance into that big old fashioned stereo reel-to-reel. The approach had been good enough for Sgt Pepper, but it took some careful planning of what was going to be laid down on the twelve original songs we wanted to capture. 4-Tracks are of course now laughably old technology, but for us, accessibility and affordability were key.
The 4-Track is essentially a compact cassette deck that allows you to play Left and Right for side A and side B, at the same time in the same tape direction. In other words, instead of having two 45-minute sides of a tape in 2 tracks or stereo, you get one side only in 4-tracks. Upside — it’s cheap. The downsides are fairly obvious, which is why compact cassettes had been superseded by CDs by the time I had graduated.
Trigger Happy started as a jam between me and Tush at his parent’s house in Chislehurst during the summer hols, and is the first song written for the album. My lyrics were a rant about the characteristic trait of wanting to make a competition out of everything, preferably leading to a fight. Having spent most of my high school days skilfully avoiding meathead footballers, I’d been more engaged with a broader variety of people in my first year at uni, and this included those who I found a bit quick to machismo.
Trigger Happy
We are sitting in a world where we all agree
That there is nothing that could come
Between you and me
For we are very good friends, and we can see
We should agree to differ in uncertainty
Don't agree with you gonna kill you
What you say to me is a lie
Don't agree with you gonna shoot your brother
Don't agree with you so you'll have to die
If it comes to that then I will stop myself
Debate logically and put my gun back on the shelf
Whether politics, religion or being born into wealth
We'll play a real ceasefire and contemplate our healthMy first music therapy then, was a measured piano progression against which I gently screamed my frustrations about caveman mentality. Tush’s folks had a modern upright with a gloriously squeaky pedal, which is still clearly audible on the final track, recorded with a ridiculously cheap mic held in front of it. Tush threaded his acerbic noodling throughout the piece, pulling it together like new laces on a comfy old boot. I still really like this track.
I worked my way through uni behind a great number of bars. It doesn’t pay well, but it does pay regularly. I got to hear many drunken conversations, and many immature drunken conversations. Let’s Just Talk About… is a crude observation of the most likely topics to appear in a bar populated by young people, especially students. We started by recording the bar in the Main Hall during rag week using the URB outside broadcast equipment. The opening is the squeaky door revealing the bustle of mindless exchanges over a pint or ten. This was always going to be a pretty simple song musically, with the harmonic progression of the vocal parts being the principal development supporting the lyrical idea that ultimately, all conversations end up talking about the same thing.
Let’s Just Talk About...
Talk about constitution
Talk about getting every day
Talk about a world pollution
Talk about getting my own way
Talk about people starving
Talk about being free
Talk about people laughing
Talk about you and me
Talk getting laid off
Talk about getting laid
Talk about getting benefits
Talk about getting paid
Talk about superficial
Talk about democracy
Talk about being official
Talk about bureaucracy
Aah, let’s just talk about sex
Talk about being President
Talk about being dumb
Talk about bodily functions
Talk about a number one
Talk about making breakfast
Talk about being late
Talk about arsenic and old lace
Just another one on the slate
Talk about a revolution
Talk about being right
Talk about whose next round it is
Talk about last night’s fight
Talk about tramps on the pavement
Talk about on the street
Talk about changing the world we’re in
Talk about who we meet
Aah, let’s just talk about sex
Talk about Liberty fashions
Talk about atomic war
Talk about the new white paper
Talk about who it’s for
Talk about people striking
Talk about your own God
Talk about cracks in the pavement
Then talk about the sod
Who put the tax on your beer up
How you see him every day
How you haven’t got time at the moment
As you’ve got to go home for a lay
Talk about how many times this week
You’ve slept out on the tiles
Talk about how you like it best
Talk about infantile
Aah, let’s just talk about sexWe pulled this together with lots of favours, students in bars, and people grabbed in from the corridor outside the studio. Richard George from Battle of the Bands competitors Quincunx was guesting on guitars. He had about 5 minutes to master the riff, whilst Clodagh, Keith and I worked on the 3-part harmony. How we squeezed Gavin and his drums into a 6' by 4' box room, I don’t know. This was quite fun to do live, challenging my quietly prudish nature.
Who remembers what a Telex was? This was a real bit of kit being used in the office in Milton Keynes when I was on summer placement. There was a real person sitting at this gargantuan machine, sending a Telex, of all places, to China. I believe the content of the real Telex was something a bit more technical than I’m making out in the lyric that it inspired, but the phrase itself was enough to spawn this simple love song. Armed with lyrics, a tune and a chord progression, Tush developed the guitar and made it a song. Charming nonsense that just clicked.
Telex To China
Telex to China
We got a long way to go
Telex to China
Must let everybody know
Couldn’t live another day without her
So far across a Yellow Sea
I sent a Telex to China
So that she could be with me
In a technical world getting larger by day
I can see her face in my pillow at night
Such a long way away on my Telex machine
She can almost seem to be kissing me
In a technical world machines get in my way
Except my Telex machine who makes life better each day
If it wasn’t for her I know that I’d be crazy
And my Telex machine would be vainly dialling away
I love my Telex machine as she is good me
She wouldn’t gripe all day if I were out for an evening
She talks to me like a true affair
But she could split on me should she ever dareWalk Right In is an ode to learning to knock before entering, or face the consequences of seeing the unexpected. Apologies to both those behind the closed door, and Bach, whose Solfoggietto is unceremoniously referenced (read nicked) in the opening bars before being crashed by Richard’s rather punkish guitar thrashing. Clodagh is on backing here, capturing a song we had done live a number of times the previous year. I have fond memories of the two of us practising that thirds harmony in chromatic progression over and over again in the back of the van. Whilst it’s simple in theory, it’s incredibly difficult to be anything like in tune, even if it is punk. We had to shoe-horn Gavin and his drums into the tiny box studio again. The riff he played was originally just a warmup routine, but it was just what the track needed, and we pounced on it when the track was first being put together. It was exhilaratingly loud recording in that tiny room.
Walk Right In
Walk right in, cross over the door
Don’t bother knocking just get on the floor
Walk right in, turn off the light
Doesn’t bother me what you’re feeling tonight
Put your lights out before the dawn and
Step on into me
It’s been a good night out up until now
I’ve had your mind, now I want your body
Open up for me
I’m on my knees and I won’t go any lower so
Do your bit for me
Can’t keep inside what I feel tonight
What I feel for you
All locked up tight need a double-barrelled key to
Get inside of you
If the truth be known you know as much as I do
You know that I need you
Everybody knows so you might as well face it
Gonna get my way with youWrapping one’s head in enough Sellotape to keep the Titanic afloat was all in the name of art. Robin, who lived in Chris’ house, wielded the camera, and we persuaded another friend John Gibb to get his airbrush out and turn the frankly horrible shots into something a bit more artistic. I still like John’s painting that made it on the cover of the album, but I now look back at the photos with a more considered outlook. Nothing wrong with Robin’s photography, but my idea itself is I think a bit of an ill-judged metaphor.
The title track, Plastic Surgery, is a discourse on the meaninglessness of existence with or without organised spirituality in one’s life, and how almost all religious groups have a tendency to promote that those outside their group are just that — outsiders — and therefore second class. Really heavy student stuff. The track is full of synthesisers and an (actual) 808 Drum Machine begged and borrowed from wherever I could; I am eternally grateful for kit loans from friends like Rich Canning. Clodagh and motormouth mate Keith were invited to ad-lib a studio-style conversation about the meaning of God in whatever form to create the coda. The three of us crammed into the tiny URB space, and let loose. After about a dozen takes in which none of us could keep a straight face for 2 minutes (in spite of our genuine Saturday morning sobriety), we took what we had and kept the guffaws in as they were honest. Chris spliced the mess together with his scalpel and sticky tape. All the vocals on this track are a very youthful me; a few decades on, I can no longer reach anywhere near those high notes.
Plastic Surgery (OFFENSIVE)
Come and join in, come and be as one
Come into our arms, come into my hands
Spastic, joker, ugly, pique
Get outside of our well-groomed clique
Thalidomide, wheelchair, nigger, spic
You don’t belong in our little niche
Alky, junky, woman, man
You won’t get in, see if you can
You’re a bender, a corker, a pretty rich ham
What you doing in my sight little man?
Get out of my sight
Surgeon’s ready with his gleaming knife
We can make you into a loving wife
Surgeon’s ready with his paper mâché
He’s gonna mould your face, you’re gonna be an ashtray
Have another chance you’ll be as good as new
Stripped to the bone by the surgeon’s scalpel
We have the technology
We can rebuild you into the image of God.The lyric for City of No Soul came first courtesy of my summer placement in Milton Keynes. I was stationed there at a time in which the city grid had been laid out in big 2km squares, and all the main roads — and interconnecting roundabouts — were constructed. The two dozen or so 2km squares of Buckinghamshire countryside within each square had each been designated as one of residential, industrial, retail or educational, like a giant precursor to the Crystal Maze. However, only about five or six of those squares had been built. The rest were building sites to be, and were in limbo. The trees had been cleared, and the only thing left in the unbuilt squares were piles of aggregate, smouldering bonfires and ragwort. Desolate and empty, Milton Keynes in its incubation state was like something from a dystopian or post-apocalyptic filmset. I never quite worked out if it was Clockwork Orange or The Road.
City of No Soul
Glassman’s hungry
He’s got us looking out
Trapped in a shelter built
To keep the people out
Glassman’s hungry
He’s got us trapped inside
But you can’t see him as he was
Built to hide
The iron man’s laughing
His plan worked well
But his people are dying
In this infernal hell
Glassman’s shing through two-way facade
But his pockets are ripping from this endless charade
His government is happy, they never come to see
What he’s done to his people
What he’s done to you and me
He’s made a city of no soul
Livestock still, infertile
Trapped in wicker cages
Glassman’s lured his people here
With massive plastic wages
Built with a purpose
Built for a 1000 years
Build with concrete
To wash away the tears
My temper’s getting blacker
The pavement’s getting redder
The grass is getting greener on the outside
He’s made a city of no soulI had the pleasure of staying in a square box house yards away from the most famous landmark in the city — the concrete cows. They really were unimpressive, fenced in with a cheap and nasty fence to keep away the vandals. My first stay spawned the words for City of No Soul, because that’s what it was then. It’s improved since they built the rest of it.
The song itself was written in Duncan’s rooms in Oldfield Park. In a Victorian gothic setting, we explored what we could do with a slap bass and voice led-song. It’s just a chant really, and the flat synth sound very representative of both the tech of the moment, and the emptiness of the cityscape we were dissing.
Another of my fellow sponsored students who had the delights of whiling away the summer in Milton Keynes got to live in Bletchley. His alliterative address, 105 Hunter Drive, spawned the nonsense lyric of the next track, through nothing other the title. There was absolutely nothing inspiring about the place. In fact, the only thing I actually remember about it is my friend Steve critically assessing Sam Brown’s wonderful first album STOP! in his Ford Fiesta by sampling each song for about 10 seconds before declaring it devoid of content. He was of course as wrong about Sam Brown as pretty much everything else. We haven’t stayed in touch.
105 Hunter Drive
Stranger things have happened to me
A stranger said to me
As I was strolling happily by
As tortoise flew right over me
I looked to the sky as a tree went by
Soaring on course for the moon
The sun was green and the lights went out
And we stood up and peered at the gloom
Stranger said I and turned in reply
As walked through the walls of the house
The chimney was shaking, his knees started quaking and
suddenly I was a mouse
You’re in 105 Hunter Drive
A happy hat said to me
The floor turned to jelly and
So did the telly and
A rabbit was suddenly free
Ooh where are we?
105 Hunter Drive The rabbit had horns and he looked so forlorn
And then downed a bottle of rum
He suddenly grinned and I smiled and I spinned
And I found myself sucking my thumb
The stranger returned and whilst smiling confirmed that the rabbit was really my mother
That I should not forget that to give is to get and really should talk to another,
So I looked all about and stared to shout that he really could do with a biscuit
But Sally was there and she looked oh so fair, and I thought about whether I’d risk it
Sally was gone, the stranger was wrong, my tummy had started to rumble
I looked down below, I have started to glow and felt so incredibly hum
Ooh where are we?
105 Hunter Drive 105 Hunter Drive is what the topper had said
I realised his meaning and why he was leaving
And found myself going quite red
I knew he was right, and it gave me a fright as the ceiling turned into the floor
The door was jar and not very far I had called at the wrong house next door.
The best thing about 105 Hunter Drive is not the place; it’s not the nonsense lyric; it’s certainly not me on the guitar, it is of course the open space it gives my old friend Bill Crowther to improvise on his tenor sax for a couple of minutes. The guy was the epitome of jazz cool. He wandered up and down the scales with aplomb until a gradual hint of “the band’s about to come back in, in 3, 2, 1…” from me and Chris behind the glass. Even through this was take one, he was muttering afterwards that this wasn’t anyway near expansive or innovative enough. To me, who meticulously wrote everything down before I could even contemplate hitting a note, it was just magic how anyone could riff for several minutes, in the right keys, in time, and with musicality and direction. I don’t recall the use of any diminished sevenths though.
The student rag review of our Plastic Surgery album picked out 105 Hunter Drive as one of the highlights for its wandering minstrel jazz sax. Listening back, I would agree that this track has one of the best elements of togetherness on the album, with some of the least indulgence, in spite of the long solo. The opening for the second side, is a polar opposite. The Worm That Never Dies is a three-parter that at best needed a good edit. I’d been listening to far too much early Genesis, and needed someone to say no to these 11 minutes of drivel.
Most of my friend group were from the School of Engineering, because that’s what I was doing all day. But echoing the band’s multidisciplinary makeup, I had friends from other bits of the university that most sparky engineers didn’t know exist. One of these was Sharon: not only female (a shock to most electrical engineers) but also reading Sociology. We had long, deep and really meaningful conversations about all sorts of nonsense. She was always on a mission to discover the hidden intent and deepest pathological revelation inside the lyrics I was scribbling within my songwriting genius. This was often fun, and sometimes really rather silly. A fitting example would be the song Blue Sky, a live version of which can be found on Out In the Air. Blue Sky’s lyric was inspired by a beautiful winter day. It was fantastically bright and sunny with long crisp shadows matching the crunchiness of the few remaining leaves clinging to tree frames. Every breath left tentative vapour trails and the whole morning was mindfully still enough to hear frost scrunching half a mile away. From a perfectly blue sky, flakes of the most mathematically flawless snow drifted down in lackadaisical spirals. And from this I was inspired to write a song about idiots wanting to blow up beautiful things.
Having got to the bottom of Blue Sky, I set Sharon a harder task in The Worm That Never Dies. Whilst 105 Hunter Drive was clearly just a Dong with a Light on the end of his Nose, the Worm gave the impression of something intense, dark and hidden. There was no such nugget at its heart. The lyric was also pure nonsense with an intentional design to sound like something more. We dressed it up in layers and layers of angst driven analogue-synths pulsing like helicopter-rotors, and single note acoustic-guitar-picking in a flamenco style. We dressed it up in a crowd of people grabbed from the corridor, squeezed into the studio and moaning like a festival-hangover. We even threw in one of those silly gadgets that were all the rage that Christmas for putting on your dashboard to emulate laser bombing the idiot driver in front (to stem the road rage).
Sharon fell for this incredibly pompous joke completely, and I ran it for ages. Who knows, maybe it did reveal more about my inner psychology that I realised at the time? It’s not a very good piece of music though.
What Do You Mean? is a much better song and one I had written at home on the black notes of the piano some time before going away to uni. This was the second early song I penned to have made it on to Plastic Surgery, and I think the classier of the two. This is the slow one, and we’d performed it live many times over the preceding years in a variety of orchestrations. For the album, I developed two ideas: firstly, that it had always sounded better with Jo singing it than with me, and secondly, I really wanted to incorporate a string quartet somewhere on the album, and this slow number was the place.
Jo was up for it, and we recorded her chilling vocal without frills, bells or whistles. It’s not an easy thing to sing, if only because as Bill pointed out the previous year, it does go off on one harmonically. Diminished seventh progressions are not unusual in Jazz and Classical music, but I’d find it difficult to identify a genuine pop song that thought it was a good idea to use them. Combine that with starting the verse in Eb major, and then transitioning to A major for the bridge and it becomes musically challenging: this transition is a tritone jump — something of a naughty step in classical, jazz and pop. So top marks to Jo for pulling it off.
What Do You Mean?
What do you mean?
What do you say?
I gave you everything
And now you turn away
You go today
Leaving me nothing
What could make you stay?
Couldn’t care less
Shouldn’t care about me
You think about yourself
Don’t try to stretch your heart out
Don’t ever cry inside
How can you leave?
Why must you go?
Couldn’t you stay a while
Another day or so?
The final show.
You never knew me
How will you ever know?The backing track for What Do You Mean? was the first string quartet I had ever properly penned. In truth, it was a transcription for string quartet rather than a composition. Writing it out was relatively uncomplicated. Performing it was as tricky as the vocal line. A piece written for the black notes in a flat key does not lend itself well to string instrumentation. This was something I learnt well at that point and have never repeated in the nine proper string quartets I have since composed. When it came to recording the quartet, I rounded up a couple of violinists, John Martin and Mike Salamy, and my friend Robyn (the photographer) who could also play the cello. I took the viola part. I didn’t have a viola, so improvised by “simply” tuning down the strings on my violin. It made for an extraordinary slack and sloppy tone, but we just about got away with it in the mix, where it adds a level of sincerity that the synths elsewhere don’t. And Gavin was always saying:
“We need more strings”
Plastic Surgery was mastered on big old analogue reel-to-reels. Many years later when CDs had become somewhat more mainstream, and the digital technology behind them now affordable to those running small studios, my wife bought me the opportunity to get Plastic Surgery (and the next album, The Long, The Short and The Tall of It) remastered from those tapes to digital. This wasn’t cheap, so it was a terribly exciting Christmas present for Chris and me to trot along to this dodgy studio towards the dodgier end of Ladbroke Grove where this sound engineer would do our stuff. He took a long day remastering our old analogue stereo tapes. He had tools which at the time we could only dream of, but which of course within a few years we would have at home. He took our money, and gave us our new CD masters and a bit of never-forgotten wisdom:
“…flutes don’t belong in rock or pop music, ever.”
He clearly didn’t like the coda of What Do You Mean?, however moody it was. It had however been a great and memorable day out. And he was wrong. Flutes should be used in rock and pop music very sparingly. Yeah, Jethro.
Once In Your Lifetime was the first real song I wrote. Again, written at home as a sixth former, and at the piano. Originally titled Once In A Lifetime, it was rechristened when being recorded for Plastic Surgery when Chris pointed out that this band Talking Heads already had a fab tune called the same. I’d never heard of Talking Heads when I wrote it. I am now better informed, and indeed took my youngest to see Stop Making Sense only this summer; I have never jiggled so much through a film. I already knew it was a brilliant album because it echoed around the house as we were revising for our finals, but if you haven’t seen the film, do so. I’d like to think that David Byrne’s much later solo album Grown Backwards, which is essentially him and a string quartet, is his homage back to my own What Do You Mean?, but I don’t think he’s ever come to see me play.
Once In Your Lifetime
Once in your lifetime you’re out of your head
You think you know everything but you’re out of your depth
You don’t know where it came from, you don’t really care
There’s a feeling what it is but you’ll hide anywhere
To get away from it. What can you get out of it?
Don’t hide; don’t run
Speak to her, you’ve got to make it fun
Just take up your chance, take the girl by the hand
Take her up to the dance and understand
That this might not happen
Once in your life you’re ahead
Take this chance before your heart bleeds
Once in your lifetime you’re so out of touch
For such a big man, you don’t know much, about
What you should do, what you should say, or
How you can get through the rest of the day
Don’t hide away from it. What can you get out of it?
Once in your life you’re at the top
Take this chance don’t let it drop
All of your life, you’re ahead
Take this chanceBy genuine coincidence, Once In Your Lifetime has the same chord structure as Happy Hour by The Housemartins. When I first noticed this, I was horrified that I may indeed have subconsciously copied the sequence. It took a completely independent genius on the subject on songwriting (I forget who) to put me at ease with the wise words that this was completely acceptable — in fact, positively encouraged. What I had initially considered to be a thoroughly unique chord pattern that I had painstakingly developed at the keyboard through extensive trial and error was in fact just a pattern that had been similarly found and used successfully at least once elsewhere, probably many times over. The genius’ words of wisdom were that using established patterns was the basis of all western harmony, cadence, and transposition; patterns defined acceptability, and indeed, the 12-bar blues. I.e. I could get over myself for a bit.
This version of the song goes back to its roots: just me and the piano. No overly complex orchestration, no strings, drums, rhythm or backing. I like that it’s clean and controlled. I had a tendency to play this too fast live, and the twiddly piano solo in the middle very easily got out of hand when the opening chords were a little too frisky.
People say I’m crazy, but how would they know? I’m a fish. Fsh. A short and deeply meaningful song articulating exactly what it is to be a Fish Without An Eye. The peculiar scatting is a none-too-musical interpretation of the Dolby noise signature used to benchmark high-end compact cassette equipment at the time. Don’t you just love those obsolete technologies?
The closing track on Plastic Surgery was a live cut taken from the Out In The Air recording. Tush and I wrote Making Paper Planes together in his front room in the relatively early days of the band. It was a real joint effort; the seed of inspiration was him exploring what was possible on the guitar by hammering notes on the fretboard rather than picking them. It needed some high amplification and some clever left-right hand interaction that looked very smart. My vocal line emerged as a counterpoint and the initial lyrics sprang out. The chord sequences were filled in off the back of this ethereal combination and a fairly hefty rock number came into being pretty quickly.
My lyrics for Making Paper Planes are a moody whinge about working on things that I was uncomfortable about. I didn’t come to realise it until several decades later, but this was the articulation of a personal value set, cementing boundaries that remain fundamentally important to me today. Attempts to breach those boundaries by myself or others have always ended in an unhappy place. I’m literally writing this from one of those unhappy places now that has been made bricks and mortar and hourly checks. There’s a lesson in there.
Making Paper Planes
I’m sending out the signals
Signals are lost in space
If a signal bounces back to me
A handgun starts the race
Rockets racing forward
Fireworks light the sky
Shouting grace to the clouds above
We must just lay down and die
I know they’re there but I’m not scared
Water down the drain
Making paper planes
No water for the grain
Buying paper planes
Too many people for the world today
Work hard get a company car
Drive it down the street
Happy with my work success
But shunned by those I meet
Hypocritical speeches
Nobody understands
What I’m doing here all by myself
To meet my world’s demandsThis is a genuine live recording which we had nothing more than an EQ to improve on. The crowd cheering us on at the start is however a bit of a cheat since we only have a few hundred people in front of us when it was recorded (courtesy of that Nelson Mandela). It’s 1989, so there’s no easy fix. Chris and I spent hours sifting through the radio station sound FX library for a viable crowd to give our stalwart supporters a modest boost, but all without success. Eventually we alighted on something probably not 100% legal, but given the way in which sampling then developed over the next few years, I think we can be forgiven. Let’s just say that in the end, the Wembley crowd were with us on the day, one way or another.
Making Plastic Surgery was an absolute privilege of student education in the 1980s. Had Tush not been in Spain furthering his linguistic ability for most of the year we were putting it down, it would have been significantly more of a double act in terms of writing and performing. As he was away, I took what we’d done live and ran with it and I am still grateful to everyone for going along with what was largely my writing vision, however meandering and occasionally inarticulate. So many great friends contributed instruments, equipment, time and talent. Chris’s patience behind the decks was immeasurable as we immature performers mucked around childishly. His skill with a scalpel made a bit of art from a load of chaos. And it lives on: I’ve just discovered that Making Paper Planes was streamed over 11,000 times last month in Iran of all places. Surreal.
Originally published at https://bluepowder.uk.
