Prologue — Out In The Air
Just over twenty albums ago, Tush and I moved into halls of residence opposite each other at pretty much identical moments. He was in room 1; I was in room 2. We were on the top of a cold, windy and damp hillside on the fringes of the stunningly beautiful city of Bath, shoving our essential possessions into uniform magnolia breeze-block cells, and both doing our utmost best to dismiss our very uncool parents with a complete lack of emotional awareness.
1986. A time of both opportunity and no opportunity, lip gloss and beige Ford Fiestas with real spark plugs and that gave up in heavy rain. The only way to call home was with the very public booth at the end of the corridor down which the prevailing wet west wind bawled constantly, sustaining a challenge to hear and not be heard. Computers were something that organisations bought and looked after. Everyone still went to the pub for entertainment. TV was broadcast in a handful of channels, and the world was very much analogue.
Tush was at least a foot taller than me. He was both more tanned and blonder than me, and he had this magnificently leonine mane that said something about unapproachability. I saw the guitar go into his room. I saw the amp go into his room. I saw the effects rack go into his room. I had my violin. He was too cool.
We acknowledged each other and didn’t form a band.
I cooked the block a Christmas dinner and facilitated an hour of socialising by the whole houseful of a dozen weirdos, during which it became obvious why we had ignored each other for the preceding ten weeks. I fought the squirrels. It got colder and eventually snowed, and so my friends snowed me in with a foot-thick wall of the white stuff over my door inside the stairwell.
The first few terms of uni were full of excruciating lectures about things I should have understood more than I did. From out of the hundreds of bored faces staring dully at the chalk and scrawl, an excellent if eclectic clique — that has largely stood the test of time to this day — formed around common threads. I’m not sure we were all good for each other; plenty of confirmation bias reassured us that we were all doing enough work to do well, which of course turned out to be somewhat untrue. As well as the pub, there were gigs and clubs to go to, which were always more attractive than Heisenberg’s unclear and uncertain maths. We mostly agreed that the student-approved music of the time was highly acceptable and would strut out on the dancefloor to do the actions to Sledgehammer, Road To Nowhere and Don’t You Forget About Me — much to the despair of the resident DJs who were clearly desperate to play some actual dance music.
Bath was and is a beautiful city. Built as a hip alternative to Regency London, it looks its best on a beautiful sunny day from the hills that surround it. One of those is the stunning Solsbury Hill (that Peter Gabriel warbled about). We did a great picnic up there before they carved it up with an unedifying dual carriageway to shovel in more tourists. The tourists brought in the money from America and Japan, marvelling at all the old buildings, and ignoring the ugly new ones like the university. The tourists in turn attracted a profession of beggars into the city, and I too milked the opportunity on many occasions to turn a few quid busking in front of the Abbey. For the record, Mozart on the flute is more lucrative than anything on the violin. Maybe that says something about my intonation?
The locals largely tolerated the small student population at the time. Back then we were a relatively modest 2,500 across the city, but there was already some friction. Some kind souls did give us lifts up and down the big hills; others were offended at us turning up at all. I was fortunately only assaulted the once whilst waiting for the giveaway no 18 bus after a shift in the pub. I really hadn’t a clue what had hit me or why, but the blood washed off. I figured once was enough and made a point to melt into the shadows a bit more when out on my own that late.
I had my violin with me, but no-one to play with. The university was too small in those days to have an orchestra or choir. The itch to actually make some music was getting itchier. The violin wasn’t going to cut it so I spent rather too much of my grant money on a (very) second-hand Fender Rhodes Stage 73. It cost me about £300 then, and looking at eBay today, I wish I’d held onto it a bit longer. It was a pig to carry, a pig to tune, and a pig to play. But it was a piano, and a piano is way cooler than a violin if you want to seed some sort of band. An interesting side note — a Stage 73 just fits on the back seat of 1972 VW Beetle with about 1 cm to spare, and you could sit the band on top of it. A stage 73 also fitted inside my student cell of a room and could be played with headphones at midnight.
The first attempt to scratch the itch was Scrubbed Gravel. As in:
“ …your voice sounds like scrubbed gravel.”
The unlikely band was a motley collection of friends who somehow agreed to meet in the one uni practice room available and make a dreadful noise. Between us, we could hit piano and drums, plug in a guitar, thump a bass, and scream into a cheap microphone. I penned half a dozen tunes that were way too difficult for our collective ability, and the group quickly fizzled out without recording or performance. A few lessons were learned during those noisy couple of months about why most bands stick to 4/4, and about how not everyone likes super-complex prog-rock harmony progressions that even Richard Strauss would turn his nose up at.
Scrubbed Gravel was dead then. Time to start talking to Tush, even if he was a modern languages student.
We formed the new band in 1987. Duncan and Clodagh came across from Scrubbed Gravel, and Tush joined us. I have no actual recollection of when or how, so it somehow just happened. Gavin joined us on drums following an advert. We were already breaking the uni-band rules by having engineers, languages, pharma students and locals in the band. In one of those intense discussions, Tush suggested the name Blue Powder. None of us particularly liked it but since no-one had anything better, it stuck. We booked the one uni Practice Room again, selected the playable few of the songs I’d already penned, and made some actual music. The band supplemented our concise list of originals with a handful of acceptable covers, and we pencilled in the uni Battle of the Bands for our first public performance. A set of six numbers including two of mine, George Michael’s Faith, Bryan Adam’s Run to You (it’s very high, you know), U2’s Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (also quite high), and for some reason, Peter Gabriel’s Biko. I have no idea who won, but I know it wasn’t us. We did however get a good reception, and a memorable nod from a jazz-musician and friend Bill Crowther from So What! for using diminished seventh chords in my scribblings. Like, so cool, man.
The acts for the Battle of the Bands had been captured on tape by the University Radio crew, URB. And thus began an excellent long-term association with Chris Green, who had ironically been my literal neighbour in the adjacent breeze block mansion since my arrival in Bath.
As the year was ending, Chris recorded one of our summer gigs at the uni amphitheatre. We had played together enough to be pretty tight as a band by this point. However, we couldn’t complete with the Mandela concert at Wembley being shown live on the TV that afternoon, and the assembled crowd was modest and politely enthusiastic. Our set by now was more heavily biased towards our own numbers, but with a handful of select covers to keep the punters engaged. Tongue in cheek, we included The Cult’s Rain, which produced the biggest reaction from a bunch of very relaxed goths, but absolutely no rain. The sun stayed resolutely sunny, and all remained terribly pleasant. Chris’s recording was a triumph of engineering ingenuity over equipment, being centred on a radio mike gaffer-taped to the main tent-pole holding up the awning over the band, relaying the sound out to the University Radio studios half a mile away to be captured on a quarter-inch reel for subsequent splicing and editing. This became our first recording, Out In The Air. We were five people in an open sided tent, playing live and enjoying it.
Another gig I remember fondly that year was in the sultry and world-famous basement club, Moles. Hidden under the terribly Georgian pavement of Bath’s George Street, we trod those same cellar flagstones as some subsequently more successful acts such as The Smiths, Blur, Oasis, and some bloke called Ed Sheeran. It was dark, and late, and we held that stage with audacity. It was at this gig that Jo Keizer joined us to sing What Do You Mean? with a chilling focus. Sitting back on the Fender and letting Jo take the vocal lead gave Tush and me the space to noodle audaciously on Spanish guitar and solo flute, a cue to sink back into the heaviest of heavy reverb to boost the intrigued atmosphere and hippy applause dripping from the low ceiling. I think that moment might have even been jazz. There is of course no recording of our night at Moles, but we did capture her singing that number in a later gig at the university that created another special atmosphere, which is the one on Out In The Air.
Originally published at https://bluepowder.uk.
