Supporting Hawkwind on Tour 2006, Final Part....It All Ends in Derby.

Then, there we were, beatling up the M5 for the last time, heading for Derby Assembly Rooms and with an extra body on board. Rick was the owner of Feel The Quality Records, a small Bristol label that had put out two recordings of mine: the Lastwind Demo and This, That, The Other, 3 songs of mine with two versions of each, my mix and his. The original recording of Paris-Marseille was on this EP, sung by Laurence de Loes, Belgian father and mother from the Cote d'Ivoire, a lovely young lady with a smooth voice who played in a future version of Lastwind, providing backing vocals and percussion. Anyhow, Rick really wanted to come, to be part of the crack, to help sell some CDs and to try and get a decent live recording of our set. He's quite a quiet guy who lives on the ninth floor of a mainly Somali inhabited tower block between Stokes Croft and the Royal Bristol Infirmary, a fairly wild neighbourhood.

The drive passed without incident and we headed first for the hotel we had booked for the night: I had to drop Olivier off at Luton Airport the next day on the way back to Bristol. It was a fairly typical 2 star place with Rick's room a long way from ours but we were pleased to find out it had a bar which stayed open quite late. Then we had the usual problem of trying to find a way round the one-way system to the theatre and then a way from there round the back to the stage door. We got our gear in back stage and then moved into a dressing room with our name on the door only to be moved out by Chris who had discovered that Dave and her's room was smaller than ours. We called in at the rest of Hawkwind's dressing room and were wished good luck by Jason and Alan and got a smile from Richard.
Rick did a good job of getting to know the sound engineer and had arranged to get his recorder wired up to the desk so we should get a good recording of the live sound and the engineer promised to give us a good sound. And our sound check sounded the best yet!! Rick also got a table stand set up in the entrance hall to sell our slightly poor range of merchandise. We dashed out for some food round the square where the theatre was placed; the name was crap but the place was actually rather smart inside. There was a Nando's just along the square and we went in there but it was rammed and we were obviously going to have to wait some time so we moved on to a pub which was pretty empty and had fish and chips and mushy peas which was all rather copious and good. We got in our regulation GnT and had time for a quick spliff out the back before being called by the road crew to get on stage.

There was a big crowd waiting for us and we went down well right from the first number. I was well on top of my vocals by now and was lose enough to improvise some of the lyrics and Olivier was on top form, driving out some powerful solos. In fact, at the end of Paris-Marseille, a big rocker stood up precariously on his chair in the front row of the balcony and shouted out that the crowd ought to give more noise for the extraordinary guitarist, the best they were likely to see that year. That got a loud response of cheers and then another voice from the back of the hall shouted out that the keyboard player deserved a big cheer too. We looked at each other with big beaming smiles and really gave everything to the last two numbers, Slots and Monster Trucks which both got tremendous cheers and applause. There were some big biker girls down the front who were giving me the eye which led to me improvising the lyrics, "Don't look at me like that, You're scaring me to death," with a smile and a wink. We had done slightly longer versions of those two numbers and had therefore over-run our time or I am sure we could have done an encore, the crowd were definitely up for it and it was good to see Hawkwind and the crew joining in the applause.

But that was that. We grabbed our gear off the stage and headed out back for another smoke and then made our way out front to watch Hawkwind but were assailed by lots of people congratulating us, wanting to know where we were playing next, where they could buy our album and so on. Rick did manage to sell quite a few CDs and I was just fed up they weren't more representative of what we could do. But we had to be happy with what we had done; for a band that didn't even exist a few weeks beforehand, we had certainly pulled it off. After the gig, we went round to the Hawkwind dressing room and were treated to a glass of champagne, Dave said it was a shame we couldn't do the other gigs and even Chris congratulated us. I always got the feeling she was a bit wary of me knowing I had been friendly with Dave's first wife, Sylvie, but I might be mistaken. One thing was sure: of everyone around, I was the one who had known Dave the longest.
Jason was the person I had got on with the best and, despite having arranged to stop by his place in Honiton when I was next in the area, he died before I ever saw him again, a very sad event. Alan Davey was also very friendly and I saw him next when he had joined Hawklords. Richard, who is a very quiet and reserved person I next saw at a Hawklords gig in Frome, his neck of the woods. And Dave and Chris I saw backstage at their gig in Bristol in 2008 when Dave looked knackered and confided that he didn't think he could go on like this much longer. I lived just up the road from where the gig was and they were going to come round after the show but he was so tired they jumped in their VW camper and shot off back down to Devon.

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We went back to our hotel and ended up getting drunk with some Welsh rugby fans although what they were doing in Derby remained a mystery. We got up in time for a late breakfast and headed down to Luton to put Olivier on his plane with a fairly emotional farewell. Rick slept most of the way back, I dropped him off and got home, had a quick bite to eat and crashed for 12 hours solid.
There was an interesting end to this whole story. I was over in France for Xmas at my son's Sam's at the end of that year and went down to Avignon to record some extra vocals for the live tape of the Derby gig at Olivier's home studio. When we had finished, his wife drove us all up to Sam's for a pre-Xmas dinner......it was the 22nd of December. Sam's wife, Murielle was heavily pregnant with their second child. Us lads got well drunk and stoned and continued partying after the ladies went to bed until Murielle appeared at the top of the stairs saying her waters had broken. While Olivier's wife phoned the hospital to say they'd be arriving, I made some strong coffee and Olivier walked Sam round and round the garden. Then they set off to drive over an icy col to Valreas Hospital, a good 25 kms away. Little Elijah was born in the back of their Renault Kangoo half way to the hospital. Well done Murielle who managed that all by herself!! And it's Elijah's 10th birthday this coming Friday!!!

So that's the end of that tale. The recording we made at Derby is available for a small charge. Email me at paullastwind@yahoo.co.uk if you would like to own a copy.

Happy Christmas all and let's hope 2017 is full of more hope than 2016.

Elijah this year, 10 years old on Friday.

Supporting HAWKWIND on tour, 2006 : Part One, The Birth of LASTWIND.

Our tour poster, designed by my son Sam (Doseprod)

In January 2005, I was feeling terrible. I had pains all round my chest area and felt I was heading for a second heart attack. My doctor knew I had a really stressful, all consuming job: I was director and senior manager of Unity Bristol, an organisation which provided residential care with education for some of the most disturbed young people in the UK, particularly those of an Afro-Caribbean background. We had 75 Jamaican staff out of a total of over one hundred and just dealing with those people was hard enough, without talking about our young 'clients' who lived in ordinary houses dotted around the 'ghettos' of the inner city. Anyhow, my doctor suggested I needed some time out and, knowing I had two sons living in the South of France, told me to go away and live with them for a few months. So I did.
However, my youngest who lived just outside Najac, had three very young children so it was not so peaceful there and when I moved on to my other son, who lived in Chateauneuf du Pape, they had just had a baby so same thing there. So, on a whim, I flew out to Dominica, the small island where my partner was from staying there for a couple of months of peace then flying home to bring my partner out there because nobody had seen her for 18 years.

Where I had my tumour removed on 14th Feb 2006

Meantime, Unity Bristol had gone down the tubes because no one had been doing the job I did every Friday, chasing money we were owed and the company called in some outside people to try and sort out the lack of cashflow, at that point being owed just over half a million pounds by various Social Services. All this stressed me out even more so I returned to France and one day, by the pool, my son said did I know that I had a huge lump on my back, and I didn't. He sent me to see his doctor who sent me for an X-ray and told me I had to have the lump removed. Stupidly, and mainly because my partner could not come to France without a visa I said I would go back to the UK to have it done. This was in August 2005 and I entered hospital to have it removed in February 2006, the time it took to have all the necessary appointments for scans and biopsies which led the specialists to say I had a large tumour in the muscles of my back next to my spine, hence all the pain. They removed it, apparently the size of a flattened tennis ball. I was out of hospital quite quickly but told to stay in bed and rest for quite a long time due to the way the internal muscles had been cut. Now I'm not one for enjoying being in bed day after day particularly as I didn't get many visitors except Liz, my partner and I would have been bored to tears but for the fact that my sons, particularly Sam, got me into writing new music and putting it up on my own web site. (Liz and I also watched every ball of the Test Match series against Australia where we brought the Ashes back home - laugh as you will non-Brits.
Then, one day, completely out of the blue, I got a phone call from Dave Brock. After a short chat, sort of catching up (we hadn't spoken for twenty something years) he said he had bumped into my web site, liked my music and did I have a band so that I could come on tour supporting Hawkwind in a couple of months or so's time. Well, I was very surprised, very pleased and said 'Yes' even though I didn't really have a band as such.
I had done a recording while I was waiting to go in hospital, 3 of my tunes, one with my lyrics and two

Sonic, who recorded with me, went to school with Banksy
and told me I knew him under another name.

with lyrics by Sonic, a Bristol DJ and MC. This was organised by the keen Richard Nowell and his Feel The Quality record label. The musicians for this had been a guy from the popular Bristol dub band, DUB FROM ATLANTIS (my memory for names is bad and getting worse) on bass, Latch Mangat (who played bass in the third version of Lastwind) on guitar, Laurence de Loes sang my lyrics (and was part of Lastwind version 2) and Rob, famously having toured the world with Roni Size, on drums.(He was also famously married to the daughter of John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin fame.)
I started with these people and Rob agreed to play drums and Latch, bass, and I was thinking of an excellent guitarist friend from France. I had enough songs ready for a forty minute set and we organised a first couple of rehearsals. So far so good.
Of course, Dave needed the name of the band for publicity purposes and I had one waiting around; Lastwind. About 4 years earlier I had been introduced to a Jalal Nurinda, a black American from New York who had been in the original rap group, the LAST POETS. I didn't know of them at the time but his significance was made clear to me when a group of us, including him, went to see PUBLIC ENEMY at a largish venue in Bristol. They got him up on stage and introduced him as the Godfather of Rap, quite something. Anyhow, he was preparing a new album and needed some music and

Jalal Nurinda

samples and we started working together on several tracks in the bungalow in my garden in Bristol, my hideaway and studio, and, knowing I had played with Hawkwind, he came up with the name Lastwind from using the first and last parts of our previous two group's names. He went to France to visit a girlfriend and was refused permission to return to the USA because he had overstayed the time given on his visa. A TV company put on a concert for him years later, 2014 to be precise, where he was to perform live the original album. To give an idea of his importance to that genre a music, GEORGE CLINTON was among the musicians who turned up to play for him. I was invited but I was crossing the channel on my way to France the day it took place. Jalal is now living in a State-run old peoples' home in Atlanta.

TO BE CONTINUED : HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A BAND REALLY QUICKLY.

My Musical Career (see accompanying MIXCLOUD set).

I first got the idea of playing in a band when I was at school. I had had piano lessons since I was 4, obviously with a classical bent but, starting with Russ Conway, I had started playing along to the singles we got and played on the family Dansette. When I was in the Lower 6^th and we could stay in at break in the music room, with a few like-minded guys, we would bang out our versions of Spencer Davis Group and the Small Faces which would attract girls, our secondary objective. Then when a student in London in the late sixties, a friend persuaded me to go to an audition with a group called Sam Gopal. A fellow auditionee was the late and much lamented Lemmy Kilminster. He didn’t get the job of rhythm guitarist but I did get the job as keyboard player : I didn’t take it as I couldn’t afford to buy a Hammond B3 organ.

ARK playing live.

My real music career started with the band ARK,  North Devon band formed in the early 70’s by Chris Kausman (electric guitar and vocals), Reg Meuross (acoustic guitar and vocals) and myself. Then we added Harvey Bainbridge on bass, Colin Mitchell on lead guitar, Alistair Merry on percussion, his girlfriend Lois as dancer and, after various trials, Martin Griffin on drums. Jeff Hocking was our sound engineer and Steve Smith our roadie.

This blog post is to go alongside my MIXCLOUD selection, Music Mainly Recorded in My Holidays Over the Last Forty Years. And the first track is LIVING IN COMFORT, written by Chris Kausman and recorded by Jeff Hocking in his cramped Appleford studio. We played mainly covers of Bob Dylan and old blues songs like Parchment Farm but did play a few of our own songs written by Chris or Reg.

Harvey, Martin and Me meeting for the first time in thirty years

WE ended up supporting HAWKWIND on a short tour and then, a year later, DAVE BROCK CAME UP WITH THE IDEA OF HIM AND BOB CULVERT forming a band called SONIC ASSASSINS using me, Harvey and Martin from Ark. We had a couple of rehearsals, got together some old favourites and two new songs, Free Fall and Death Trap and arranged to play a Christmas show in Barnstaple. Just before the concert, Bob got cold feet and was only persuaded to take part right at the last minute. The place was sold out and we played continuously until we had run out of material to a great reception. During the show the band started an improvised pattern which Bob thought was going to be the song Masters of the Universe but he then improvised too and this became the cult favourite Over The Top.

The MixCloud selection has this song plus, beforehand, two Hawkwind classics, Angel of Death and Magnu, all recorded live at this concert.

Apparently we then played a second gig in Wales and then I was asked by Dave to join Hawkwind for their American tour. Whilst on this tour Dave and I did several radio interviews in which it was suggested that Hawkwind was going to morph into Sonic Assassins. However, when we got home, I had decided it wasn’t for me and that with my French wife and two children, cat and dog, I was going to move to France and Hawkwind was out of my life.

We lived in France, in the south-east, from 1978 to 1990 and during that time I played and recorded with loads of bands, some my own. Legend, Exiles, Exit, Stradivarius, and Twice As Nice among others. I equally played with the Topper Headon Band alongside the recently sadly departed Henry McCullough and we recorded a couple of my songs.

Playing with LEGEND in France 1980

I moved back to the UK, first to East Devon and then to the New Forest, in 1990. I was teaching by day and playing music at weekends with a local RnB band whose name escapes me and then joined the CROPDUSTERS, Hampshire’s version of Sussex’s LEVELLERS. We played some good gigs including the MEAN FIDDLER at New Year. It was good fun but although they asked me to, I couldn’t afford to give up my well-paid day job: I was by now Deputy-Head in a residential special needs school.

I ended up being Head Teacher and then got offered the post of Head Teacher at a school I had worked at before back in the days of ARK. That job became really full on and I was hardly at home and had no time for playing music and my wife decided to move back to France. It was when we packed up the large house we had been living in, putting most of our stuff in storage, that a trunk containing all my music tapes and other souveniers went missing. Hence the big gap in my music recordings.

Along with a new partner, I was in Bristol from 1999, running a large project for young people with severe behavioural problems. No time for music really except being asked by Rick Nowell and his small record company, Feel The Quality, to record some of my music with vocals written and sung by local Bristol DJ, Sonic. We did this along with some quality musicians including Roni Size’s drummer, Rob.

Sonic, a poet and vocalist, Bristol fashion.

The next track on MixCloud is Bristol Situation one of the songs we recorded followed by a demo Sonic and I recorded at my house, called Just Out of Reach. Both these songs are very Bristolian in style and substance.

My work was very demanding and tiring and in 2005 I was obliged to stop working due to health problems which turned out to be cancer and eventually in February 2006 I had a large tumour removed from muscles in my back next to my spine. During my recovery and with support from my sons I started to write songs again and place them on a website where they were spotted by Dave Brock of Hawkwind. He phoned me up and asked me if I had a band which could support them on tour. I lied and said yes and so LASTWIND was formed. In fact, in 2003 Jalal Nurinda of seminal New York hiphop band, the LAST POETS, had started working for me and we started working on tunes for his projected album. And I have him to thank for the name, Last from Last Poets and Wind from Hawkwind. He went to France and wasn’t allowed back into the UK so that was the end of that collaboration.

The original drummer and bassist of LASTWIND suddenly wanted to be paid a lot more than I could afford so in the end I programmed the drums and bass and we hit the road just me and the excellent French guitarist OBNY. We got a good reception supporting HAWKWIND but at the end of the tour he had to return to France.

Lastwind supporting Hawkwind 2006

The next two tracks on MIXCLOUD are live recordings from this tour, Paris-Marseille which I sung in French and our show stopping final song, Monster Trucks.

Although we did a couple more LASTWIND gigs with a different line-up, I was getting fed up with playing just that sort of music and started writing, playing and recording a series of very different songs under the name DOWNTIME. I just put these out on SoundCloud and SoundClick, an American site, where they got a good reception and I was in their charts for quite a while even with a track in their top 3 (out of several thousand).

The next three songs on the MIXCLOUD selection are from this period, although a couple of them I started working on just before starting Lastwind. Then I have included the main song from music I did for a film called Light at some time in that decade.

POLYMORPH performing live in Bristol.

I was now working as Centre Manager at a Language School in Bristol and one of the teachers was a talented writer called Johnny Trousers. He knew I had recording possibilities and asked me about recording one of his songs. Soon we had an album’s worth and put it out under the name of POLYMORPH and even played a couple of gigs in Bristol. And in the Mixcloud sequence the next two songs are from this short lived group.

Lastwind version 2 on tour, March 2013

An old acquaintance, Frenchy Golder, director of Flicknife Records then asked me about putting out a Lastwind album and then touring it. I said yes cos I was by now retired and living in Devon looking after my mum and had the time and was rather bored. I recorded the whole album alone, helped by a few guitarists, in particular Jerry Richards of Hawklords. Then, old friend Latch, back in Bristol, said he could find the members for a 5 piece band and he did, they re-recorded the album, RETURN OF THE SONIC ASSASSINS, ready for it to be manufactured and toured. This we did in atrocious weather in March 2013. They were not happy days and I decided that was the end of recording straight ahead rock and touring. There are three songs from this venture on the MIXCLOUD sequence but they are my demos versions all with lead guitar by Jerry Richards : Daytrippers, When and Autoroute.

When my mum passed on a the end of 2013, I was free and had a little bit of money she had left me so I bought a big American camper van and headed for France. I had various tunes hanging around ready recorded except vocals which I had never used because they didn’t fit into the Lastwind mould. And I was continuing to write. I wanted them to become songs but I didn’t feel like writing lyrics or singing anymore. I bumped into someone on the internet who liked what I sent him and was interested in writing lyrics and singing.

Kenneth Higgins and Me in Bangkok.

Only problem was, Kenneth Higgins lived in Bangkok.

We met up when I travelled out to Asia in the winter of 2014/15. We got on, agreed on which songs and so NAGAS was born and a first album came out in early summer 2015, COME TOGETHER and the next 4 tracks on Mixcloud are from this album. We had to change the name to NAGAS2 because there was already a group in France with the same name. I had plenty more songs to keep Ken busy and end of May 2016 we brought out a second album called KARMA VORTEX. The next four songs on MixCloud are from this album.

The final track on Mixcloud is just me, under my own name and is probably the direction I will be going in next: instrumental music with few if any lyrics, music which gives a particular ambience, sometimes for dancing, sometimes for chilling, sometimes for reflecting. But who knows. Music keeps flowing out of me and is central to my life for however much longer it continues.

Peace and On. 

Musical Activities These Days

Besides having a virtual band, NAGAS2, our new album KARMA VORTEX is just out on most digital sites, I find time for other musical ventures. One of these is putting together short tune mixes for MiXcloud, the mix tape site.
See :
http://www.mixcloud.com/paul-hayles2
I also do some DJing and am doing so this coming Friday at Camping Des Etoiles near Najac for a private party.
Then this afternoon I am having a first session with a local singer/guitarist to see if we can put a set together for a local street festival later this year based on the square where I live.
Having spent most of the winter arranging and mixing our latest album, I am quite keen on getting some new music together and have some ideas I want to try out.
If you want to hear the music we have put together Kenneth Higgins, Nueng and myself, as Nagas2, best place to go and have a good listen is www.nagas2.bandcamp.com
And there are quite a few videos up on YouTube too.
But I do get reminded of my last band LASTWIND too. I'm sending a copy of our LIVE album, recorded whilst on tour with HAWKWIND in 2006, to a fan tomorrow. I get similar requests quite frequently : you can find Lastwind's music at www.lastwind.bandcamp.com, on YouTube.
And of course you can find both groups on SoundCLoud.