An Alarm

Punk rock was quite a big deal in west Cornwall. I mean, it was quite a big deal all over the UK, but it seemed to hit deeply in the far flung wilds of the south west. I guess it was easier to feel a social outcast there due to  the relative isolation of the area. Given that Penzance is around 300 miles from London (and 80 miles from the nearest sizeable conurbation, Plymouth), it’s amazing that so many bands went the distance to play shows in this town-on-the-way-to-nowhere. But they came: The Stranglers, Ramones, The Damned, The Adverts, Generation X, The Vibrators, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello and many others all played at the Winter Gardens (known as The Garden by 1977) through the punk era. Most notoriously, the Sex Pistols played one of their last ever UK shows there in September 1977 on their infamous Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly (SPOTS) tour. Julien Temple was accompanying them on the dates, and – thank Heavens - filmed some of the Penzance show for posterity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWb2T4gQyZw

Sadly, I was 11 years old at the time, so missed these incendiary moments.  

Because punk rock was all about participation, it wasn’t long before bands started springing up in the area. I remember seeing early local punkers The Cramp at a friend’s party in 1978; other names to emerge from the scene around that time included The Brainiac Five (who lived down the road, & recorded a couple of 45s at Roche studio) , The Vendettas (whose vocalist Simon Parker worked at key Penzance record shop Chy An Stylus), Septic and the Sceptics, and The Rusty Bottles. Formed by brothers Noel & John Lane (Noel was the band’s main singer & songwriter), The Rusty Bottles recorded a demo at Sentinel circa 1978 (which I’ve been unable to track down, more’s the pity), before mutating into An Alarm.  

An Alarm were definitive post punk, though with a unique outlook that could only be found in a place like west Cornwall. Their first demo tape - also recorded at Sentinel - was called “Welcome To Penzance”, and the opening title – “Bandwagon (Welcome To Penzance)” – had a lyric which seemed to focus on the dichotomy between the need to escape the local scene, and the need to stay, in order to keep the scene alive. The guitar solo included a snippet from “The Floral Dance”. How we laughed. Other titles, such as “Someone’s Life” were a personal take on the politics of the era (“The bomb was cleverly concealed underneath the back seat of his car. He didn’t know what hit him, and he’s quiet now. His wife fainted when she saw the blood on the double yellow line.”), while others were character sketches of friends (or, more likely, enemies): “Cally’s Cax” is the tale of a local sleep-around, “One More” cocks a snook at an associate who’s about to leave for University. Many of their songs were concerned with the unviability of being a working musician in such an insular environment as west Cornwall, and the frustration of trying to get your point across to an unreceptive audience: “We know we face blind ignorance. We receive it with gradual acceptance. We listen to – but don’t accept – advice, and try to put over an air of confidence. But we don’t give up. You can’t go back. The clocks won’t stop.” (“Gradual Acceptance”). It’s witty stuff; purposeful, and lyrically brilliant.  

An Alarm never broke out of that local scene, but they went on to record a couple more demos of increasing musical worth (“For The Sheep” and “Throttle”, both home-recorded), which maybe I’ll upload at a later date, though they rather fall outside the remit of the blog. Noel Lane left the area around 1982 to spend time in Huddersfield, where he recorded as Anne Gwirder, before moving to Bristol. Here he formed Chorchazade, who released an intriguing LP (”Made To Be Devoured”) and EP (“Ah, You Are As Light As A Feather”) for Revolver in  the late 1980s; Steve Albini was an admirer, apparently. Before the big myspace meltdown, Noel could be found there under his nom-de-plume (he was also a published writer) Bunny Dees, after which the trail goes cold. However, he was interviewed for the Perfect Sound Forever website in 2012, where he discussed – amongst other things - the making of the Chorchazade records.  

http://www.furious.com/perfect/chorchazade.html  

Something of a lost talent, I think. Here’s “Bandwagon” and “Someone’s Life” from that An Alarm demo tape, recorded at Sentinel early in 1979.

Folk In Cornwall

There was far more to the Cornish folk scene of the 60s & 70s than the few records that seeped through onto the Sentinel label. It was a remarkably fertile training ground for many artists; this movement has been newly documented in a book by Rupert White, entitled “Folk In Cornwall”. The book tells the story from the early years of the beatnik scene in St Ives & Newquay in the early 60s, right up to the final days of the Pipers Folk Club & the Folk Cottage, and encompasses world-renowned artists including Donovan, Ralph McTell, Clive Palmer, Michael Chapman and Wizz Jones (the cover star), all of whom either served musical apprenticeships in the county, or were attracted by the ambience of the area & chose to stay. And, of course, all the key natives (Brenda Wootton, Richard Gendall et al) are heavily featured too.  The narrative is told almost entirely through the voices of the interviewees (all the above -and many more- are heavily quoted throughout), and there’s little expansion from the author on their quotes. White has simply carried out the research & joined the dots. I say “simply”; the research is meticulous to say the least, and is impressive enough to carry the book on its own.

Even so, this makes “Folk In Cornwall” quite a dry read, and one which could definitely have used a(nother) proof-read. But it’s a fascinating story, and one which casts a wider net than you might imagine. This is the only place you can hear the story told. My favourite quote is this striking piece of scene-setting from Michael Chapman, in which he explains the genesis of “Fishbeard Sunset” from his second LP “Fully Qualified Survivor”....

“When John The Fish was playing at The Count House, he always had one eye out of the window, as we had a tradition that the gig would stop and the entire audience would walk out onto the cliff to watch the sunset, then come back in again and we’d restart. So one night I was sitting to one side of the stage watching the sunset through Fish’s beard. And that’s where the title comes from....”

I was delighted to read in a recent issue of The Cornishman that this tradition still stands. Can we have more gigs where people leave the venue to watch the sunset, please?

Buy “Folk In Cornwall” here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/161057817420

Hear “Fishbeard Sunset” (but not Chapman’s version, sadly) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2aspndm-w

Pasties & Cream in The Cornishman

On a recent trip down to Newlyn, I spent much of my time rifling through my parents’ book & magazine collection (which they are currently whittling down). I was pretty delighted to come across a copy of local newspaper The Cornishman from July 1971 in their shed, and was even more pleased to find an article about Brenda Wootton’s “Pasties And Cream” LP (SENS 1006). The Cornishman, of course, is depicted on the cover of the album, together with the Cornish delicacies after which the album is named.

One day I’ll get round to writing about this most renowned of Sentinel LPs myself, but for now I’ve reproduced the article here, together with some other relevant bits & pieces from the same edition, including an advert for a quite amazing week of shows at Penzance’s The Garden. See Queen (lest we forget, "Roger Taylor's group, formerly Smile") for 25p! Beggars belief, really...

 

Gill Watkiss

Here’s another Sentinel album where the significance of the cover outweighs that of the music within. It’s a Christmas album from the Holman Climax Male Voice Choir (and associates) and features the usual mix of traditional carols & festive cheer.  What makes this album more appealing is the cover painting, an early work by Penwith artist Gill Watkiss. A fairly realist depiction of a Christmas scene, it’s fairly atypical of her approach; her painting is usually far more stylised, and all the better for it. For me, her work is the precise visual equivalent of the spookier end of early 70s psych-folk, creating exactly the same quietly unsettled, sinister aura that –say- Linda Perhacs’ “Parallelograms” or the theme from "Picture Box" conjures up. It’s all in the movement of the air and the characters’ faces; I can still remember encountering her work for the first time in Newlyn Art Gallery in the late-70s and feeling oddly uneasy. But in a good way.  

This is what she does: 

 

Amazing stuff.

Most of Gill’s paintings depict St Just & its environs, and the cover of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” (SENS 1044, 1979) is no exception, the clock in the village square being instantly recognisable in both paintings here. Recently her work seems to have shot up in value, and rightly so. She is genuinely a one-off. Her website can be found at  www.gillwatkiss.com

Lanyon Quoit

As I may have mentioned in the past, there’s only so much enthusiasm I can muster for male voice choirs and silver bands. On “The Reason Why”, by the Climax Male Voice Choir with Camborne Town Band (SENS 1020, 1974) we have a double whammy. It’s fine for what it is, but it’s not much to my taste. The cover, on the other hand, is magnificent.

Lanyon Quoit was one of the first ancient sites I ever visited, one foggy day in autumn 1976. Somewhere, I still have the photographs. But they're not as good as this one. Here is the dolmen in all its splendour, with Ding Dong mine to the right, and Carn Galver to the left. This area of west Cornwall is riddled with fantastic ancient monuments: Men An Tol, The Nine Maidens of Boskednan, Tregeseal Stone Circle, and the quoits of Mulfra, Chun & Zennor. Lanyon Quoit always looked a bit pre-fabricated for my liking; just *too* perfect to be authentic. I later found it had collapsed early in the 19^th century & was subsequently reconstructed, so maybe that's why it looks so perfectly honed. In 1769, William Borlase wrote in his Antiquities Of Cornwall that the monument was so tall that it was possible to ride a horse under the capstone. Wow.

Even so, it’s still a beautiful monument despite the reconstructive work, and the photograph - taken by Ander Gunn - that graces the cover of “The Reason Why” is a brilliantly composed image, taking in both the natural geology of the area and also its industrial heritage, as well as its ancient history.

Digging this album out reminded me of another favourite cover of mine, that of Kariba by Irish post-punkers Kissed Air. This featured Paul Caponigro’s incredible photographs of Pentre Ifan chambered tomb on the rear, and Kilclooney dolmen (I think??) on the front. There should be more ancient monuments on record sleeves, I think. Any other nominations out there (Julian Cope notwithstanding)?

More about Lanyon Quoit here: http://themodernantiquarian.com/site/235/lanyon_quoit.html

You're either on the train or you're off the train.

In a typical 1970s independent record shop (I'm thinking of "White's of Alverton" here, Penzance residents), it wasn’t uncommon to find a section marked “sound effects”, generally in between the “humour/spoken word” & “miscellaneous” sections. This would generally be filled with hi-fi test records and those BBC sound effects LPs of which Paul Weller was so fond. But it would often include a subdivision of albums consisting of recordings of steam engines. This flummoxed me as a child, but as I grow older it makes more sense. These albums weren't intended to be used to help create your film soundtrack or to check your tracking alignment. They were an entertainment in themselves, a nostalgic look back at a bygone era.

Which brings me to “An Enthusiast Remembers” (Sentinel JW 1). It’s an album of recordings made at Shrewsbury, Talerddig, Lancashire & Yorkshire during the last years of steam traction on British Railways, collected & annotated by Jonathan Wood. Not being an expert on steam locos, there’s very little I can say about the recordings, so I’ll simply quote the nostalgic, evocative sleeve notes...

“It is still dark, and there is only a murmur of traffic from the distant main road as the 4.10am Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth Mail coasts in towards the signal box, slowing to pick up the single line token from the apparatus opposite. As the train passes, the driver opens up purposefully, and the train heads towards Westbury. The countryside is quiet again, and then just before dawn the signalman can be heard replacing the token for a goods train following at 5am. This time with a heavier train the engine is working harder, and the sounds bursts out from under the road bridge just before the box, and the driver picks up the token without slackening pace. After the train has passed the sound is carried back on the light air, gradually picking up speed into the distance.”

It's all there, isn't it? I don't even need to include a sound file. Indeed, there's not much more to add, except to say that it’s difficult to see how these recordings wound up being released by Sentinel. There’s no local content (the recordings weren’t made on any South-western lines), and the copyright date is 1988, long after Sentinel shut up shop (or so I believed), so I’ve no idea quite who or what made the connection. And Sentinel didn’t exactly have a history of marketing this type of album, though a fair few of them wound up in that “miscellaneous” section I referred to earlier. But there in the credits, it states “Thanks...for endless patience in remastering the tapes to Job Morris of Sentinel Records”.

Children. Singing.

Wow. Has it really been four months since I last updated this blog? And there’s been so much Sentinel-related news! Actually, there hasn’t, of course, but that’s no excuse to not write entries more frequently. Having said that, I’ve not really found much in the way of interesting Sentinel LPs of late, so here’s a bit about the first album I owned on the label. And one on which I actually appear...

I guess it must have been July 1976, which means I was 10 years old. Just before we broke up for the long summer holiday, our primary school teacher Mrs Ellery told us an exciting piece of news: Brenda Wootton was going to be recording an LP with various children’s choirs in west Cornwall, and our school choir had been chosen as one of the participants. Teach then played a tape of a couple of the songs Brenda had demoed, and may have handed out Banda-duplicated lyric sheets too, but I don’t really remember. It didn’t really matter: we were going to be on a record! How thrilling!

So when we all returned after the summer holiday, suitably scorched from too many long days on Perran beach, the record was quite a hot topic, and we spent many Friday afternoons with Mrs Ellery, honing our craft. Or did we? It doesn’t really sound like it, judging from the rather under-arranged performances I’m listening to now. But that’s beside the point: it’s not supposed to be Bohemian Rhapsody. The five songs on which we appear were recorded in Sentinel’s Newlyn studio one Sunday morning: we were all done by lunchtime. I think we recorded no more than three takes of anything. One of us sneezed during “Thunder & Lightning”, a song celebrating clotted cream & pasties, wouldn’t you know? The sneeze is there on the LP, unedited. Some of the other recordings on the LP were made in the music room of Ludgvan School, rather than the studio, lending an even more rustic air to the album’s ambience.

Anyway, it was an unforgettable experience. I remember peeking into the studio control room and thinking, “well, this would be a fine way to earn a living”.... though actually it was probably more “wow look at all the buttons & knobs”.  Both Brenda & Richard Gendall (who wrote most of the numbers too) were welcoming, helpful & funny, and the guitarist on the album – Al Fenn – was a member of west country folk-rockers Decameron, my mum’s favourite band at the time. She was dead impressed. I don’t remember seeing much of Job. I really should have been paying more attention.

As for the record itself (Children Singing; SENS 1036), it plays the charm card quite heavily as you’d expect, but is all wonderfully evocative (that word again!), at least for me. And – I’d imagine – it would probably conjure up a few memories from some of my fellow “choristers” too. So: is anyone out there? Luke Shirley? Zora Trapp? Would love to hear from you.      

Here's "Opie, Davy, Foote, Trevithick & Bone", the opening number on the album, and a paean to five Cornish heroes.