So, what happened after the tour. All sorts of things, some straightaway, some later.
When I got home, the Yamaha keyboard was already there. I was surprised as I had made no commitment to stay with Hawkwind, if anything the contrary. I went to see Harvey Bainbridge for a meal with my family. Our two families got on well together. He had had no news of what was happening at the time which made me think the Sonic Assassins idea was dead in the water.
I got my old job back, teaching difficult kids, but resigned again within a month, I'd had enough of it.
My wife had found me very changed when I eventually returned home and said later that it took three months for me to become recognisable again. She had had lots of visits while I was away from people who wanted to know how the tour was going and people who just wanted to say they knew us, were friends with us, when they weren't really. But, she took it all in her stride, even when she caught a dose of crabs off me. We began to talk about moving to France: we had always said we wanted to bring our sons up bi-culturally.
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| The Yamaha CS80, the first commercial polyphonic synth. |
One day, out of the blue, some Hawkweed roadies came round to collect the Yamaha so I guessed something was happening band-wise. I had not heard from Dave or Bob. I had only received a communication from the 'office' asking if I knew anything about a Ford Stationwagon which had been rented to the band in California and which had run up a huge bill, being left late at LAX airport (not me guv'.).
We bought an ex-WaterBoard van and got it ready for the trip to France installing a cooker and a mezzanine type shelf for our mattress, and a bowl and a water container and other items for daily living. We sold our furniture, borrowed a load of library books we would never return, got a few items on HP we would never pay for and with my music gear, our two boys aged 7 and 3, our dog, Arwen, and our cat, Frodo, set off to catch the ferry at Poole, stopping in Honition for a last meal with my mum and dad. We were off.
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| Setting off in our old self-made camper van. |
We headed first to the home of Sylaine Cand, on the Atlantic coast just north of Royan where we had been invited to stay. Her boyfriend, David Bennett, was also there and her big family made us very welcome and we stayed there a couple of weeks, mainly getting our children used to French food which was very different. Our friends were heading east to do fruit picking and we followed them, a two day journey to Les Hautes Alpes where we picked first quinces and then apples through the summer and then, by ourselves, found a house to rent in a small village in the Drome department.
Just as money was running out, through some British musicians I had met in Nyons, our local town, I was asked to be part of a group recording an album demo for a would-be Tom Petty called Roger Spano. He had inherited a load of money and wanted to spend it on this project. A guy I had already met, called Fred Stephenson, was on drums, a weird French guy whose name I can't remember was on bass and this Spanish/French guy called Jeannot Garcia was on guitar. I was paid the equivalent of 70 pounds a week to be involved in this project and was lent a fancy Italian Alfa-Romeo sports car to get to this guy's home studio. (Not bad when you consider I was on 60 pounds a week with Hawkweed.) It got us through the next three months splendidly. Then, with the demo finished Roger and Fred set off to Paris and London to try and get a 'deal'.
Jeannot suggested that we could now do our own demo using Roger's equipment. We found another English drummer called Bill who was very good when not drunk or out of it on smack and Jeannot brought in an engineer called Michel Pradelle. We recorded a demo, half of my songs and half of Jeannot's, which we felt was much better than the other one we had worked on, and we set off to Paris and London too, with Bill the drummer who needed to get back to England for some reason.
In Paris, Warner-Fillipacci really liked one of my songs and wanted us to go off and write a few more in that ilk. Unfortunately it was the song we liked the least so we didn't follow it up and moved on to London where we got a meeting with Virgin, sharing the waiting room with a hyped-up Johnny Lydon who was trying to get a deal for PIL. Simon, the A&R guy at Virgin told us that we were not what they wanted at the moment, we were not post-punk enough. But I got a very nice letter from George Martin at Air saying I sounded like Johnny Rotten singing a Beatles number, high praise indeed.
When in Paris, I had found the new Hawklords album in a record store so I went round to the 'office' to ask Doug Smith why I had no writing credits on Death Trap and Free Fall and was told that Dave hadn't mentioned the part I had played even thought Steve Swindles, the new keyboard player, had slavishly copied my parts which were essential parts of the songs.
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| Me with my sons and our dogs in the farmyard. Happy days! |
We then met up with Fred and Roger who had had no luck with the original demo and had a couple of nights on the town before I drove with Jeannot down to Devon to see my parents and then sell my van. We hitch-hiked back home and Michel, through his mum, found a farm where the band could live and rehearse. A lovely place but Simone chucked Jeannot and Michel out after a few weeks because a) she was fed up of doing all the household tasks with no help and b) Jeannot was getting weird, thought people were after him and bought a rifle which could fire a bullet over a kilometre and would blast off blindly from the front garden. I drove them both to Toulouse where they wanted to start again and saw them rarely after. Jeannot went on to write a huge hit for the French band Gold and earn himself a load of money, creating one of the largest studies in Toulouse.
We lived quite happily in that farmhouse for 6 years, probably some of the happiest days of that marriage and I formed the first of several groups, called Exiles with Fred the first drummer, playing my original tunes. We lived in France until 1990 when we returned to the UK and during those French years I always had a band on the go, the best was a short-lived affair playing with the Topper Headon Band, ex-drummer of the Clash, alongside the well-known guitarist Henry McCullough (played tag Woodstock with Jo Cocker and later played for Wings) who sadly died earlier this year. This band was suddenly over when Topper was sent to prison in the UK for supplying some smack to a young lad who died.
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| With my 2nd partner, Liz. |
Other items I could add into the postscript are :
- I did keep asking for some royalties, especially when the Sonic Assassins album suddenly appeared and where, on top of playing credits, I still felt I had co-written Free Fall and Death Trap and that all the band should have been credited with Over the Top which was a live jam.
- I did manage to get on the guest list, sometimes AAA or VIP, for loads of gigs in France due to the Hawkweed connection, particularly memorable being Eurthymics with Mick Jones' new group Big Audio Dynamite, U2 with The Pretenders, UB40 and BAD again, David Bowie's Glass Spider tour and Pink Floyd live in Montpelier.
- Alistair Merry who was on the cover of Hawklords album and was involved in a legal struggle with the band, came to stay with us in France where he has remained, now living in Avignon.
- When Bob Calvert died, the article in Melody Maker had a picture of him cuddling the cat we had given to him.
- For years I suffered from a bad rash around my genitals and worried if I had picked up something nasty in California. But it turned out to be one of the symptoms of diabetes which I was found to be suffering from.
- I did eventually get some royalties, a sum of 40 pounds.
- I stayed in contact with Harvey Bainbridge and saw him whenever we visited England, watching him age at a really fast rate.
- My wife and I parted company in 1999 and, fairly quickly, I followed up my liking of very dark women and had a 9 year relationship with a lady from Dominica (not the republic!) which was fun,
- In 2006, out of the blue, Dave Brock phoned me to ask if I wanted to be the support band at Hawkweed's up and coming tour.
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| LASTWIND supporting HAWKWIND, autumn 2006. |
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