Part 34: (1985 continued)
There were many stories and legends circling around Morton Under Hill but the first and most frequent we heard was about the chapel with it’s silver bells that fell into the ground after the village was decimated by the Bubonic plague, leaving the bells still there, buried beneath the old apple trees. An alternative tale was that the bells were stolen by hoodlums who came with felonious intent across the fields from the neighbouring village of Feckenham.
Anyway, these tales are what I based my lyrics around for the song we called ‘Virus Meadow’. But what people love about this song, myself included, is the guitar line. And if there is one song that makes me think of that place that I still think of as home, this is it.
Whilst I was becoming more and more absorbed and drawn into the history and nature of Morton Under Hill and its surrounds, Justin was often away in London where he was embroiled in a chaotic relationship with a music journalist which would ultimately put him, and to an extent all of us, off brushing shoulders with anyone from the music business for the next two decades.
I spent many, many hours trying and failing to write lyrics. I sat and smoked and wrote letters and studied the landscape. There was just one visible house and the eye was often drawn to it, a simple white house, alone in the middle distance. Too far away to see any of it’s particular details and even when we went walking it was difficult to get close to it as it was on the other side of Brandon Brook and a bramble thicket. So we never found out if there was anyone living there or wether it was just a house of empty rooms.
When we worked on music back then, we’d work together, all four of us across the yard in The Dairy. The next song we wrote was called ‘Vincent Craine’ and was important to us as I think we grew, or matured, as a band, building dynamics and trying to find a way of expressing beauty and subtlety, and the violence of passion without being ‘pretty’ or too melodramatic. Lyrically it’s a song where nothing really happens - a woman stands behind a seated man in a room watching squares of sunlight moving across a wall. I was very pleased with everything about it.
When the weather allowed it I sometimes worked eight hour days bale carting, that is… stacking bales of hay or straw onto trailers and then unloading them into barns. Hot, hard work which made me £2 an hour, knackered and strong. In the evenings I went to village pubs, I loved pubs and wanted to visit all of them in the county if I could find them. I even dreamt about finding new pubs, which were usually in ramshackled villages that the world had forgotten, often by a river.
In September we went back into Richard Waghorn’s studio and recorded Vincent Craine and Virus Meadow. One afternoon with the autumn sun shining into the room where we were recording, Justin, Steven and Nick decided to do a spontaneous take of an instrumental idea based on the Virus Meadow theme. They said it was called ‘The plough’ and sitting there watching and listening as it unfolded was a very fine moment. Afterwards they recorded other more studied versions which didn’t sound as fluid and natural. Then, when we rewound the 2” master tape to listen to that first instinctive version it wasn’t there.
My work on the pig farm came to an end when the farmer took on another man, full time, to replace me. Instead of signing on the dole I agreed to starting a ‘work experience’ scheme which was digging and laying a path beside the river in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Simply put, I was paid the same as unemployment benefit for joining what was in effect a kind of chain gang. It was work and it was an experience. Most of the other labourers were a mix of non conformists, lost souls and unemployable layabouts who downed tools as soon as the supervisor went out of sight.
One bright autumn morning I woke up after a lucid dream, sat at my window, lit a cigarette and started writing. The dream triggered other thoughts and ideas and it all came flooding out onto the page in half an hour. Our newest piece of music was like a rush of blood too, another wonderful leading guitar part and a bass line that Steven unashamedly modelled around the opening of Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliette’. I was sure that these words were meant for it. We called the song ‘Gone… like the swallows’ and it remains a favourite of mine.
Steven went off on tour again into Europe with ‘The Very Things’ and after he retuned we were soon in the grip of winter. As we drove down to London on November 1st for our last gig of the year it began to snow. By the time we arrived at The Red Rose Club, a Labour club in Finsbury Park, the snow was settling in the carpark. It would be an evening that none of us would remember with any fondness - in fact I remember little about it apart from it being as cold inside at it was out, and that there was no PA , so we had to turn the stage monitors to face the audience and use those.
Steven seems to have the most lasting memories of that night, despite being totally drunk. Apparently we played badly and after the show the singer from the band playing before us, a certain Julianne Regan from the up and coming band ‘All About Eve’, took Steven aside and told him to behave himself… or words to that effect.
I not sure if it was a reaction to Julianne’s advice, but Steven told us to go on home without him and he disappeared into the wintery night. He has no idea what happened after that, but what he does remember is that in the morning he found himself hitch-hiking in the snow through some of the less picturesque areas of the capital in just a T shirt, as he had lost his jacket. He walked all the way north to the Hangar Lane junction before a car finally stopped and asked where he was going. By a remarkable stroke of luck the driver was also going to Redditch, where Steven then lived, and a couple of hours later dropped him off outside his home.
As they were driving up to the midlands, dropping down the cutting into Oxfordshire, with the fields white over with snow, he might have been feeling hung over and wretched about having been part of a bad London gig, but in his mind there would have been at least a ray of hope for a less miserable future for the band.
During the tour he’d just returned from, there was evidence that ‘And also the trees’ were not entirely unknown across the channel. One instance occurred in Fribourg, Switzerland. In a room of the promoters apartment, which he and the other members of ‘The Very Things’ had been invited to for a meal before the show, there was an old Jukebox. As he approached it he saw, leaning up against it’s side, a copy of the ‘Abstract compilation’ LP that we were featured on, and behind it the 12” EP of ‘A room lives in Lucy’.
This small discovery didn’t go unnoticed to Minou, the ‘Days in Europe’ tour agent who was tour managing. Minou had, of course, taken an instant and almost violent disliking to me, but Steven had tried to soften this… presumably by telling her I wasn’t always such an intolerable fop. So, after another few instances when the name ‘And also the trees’ appeared, she and ’Days in Europe’ finally offered us a mini tour in the coming new year. We had wanted this for a long time, mainly for the experience of traveling abroad as adults for the first time. We had no idea if it would change anything for us as a band. But it would.