Spherical Objects - some recollections
I was playing guitar for a college band. Our best song was 'Daddy Cool' (Boney M?). We did our one and only gig in Rochdale Art College's bar. Inga Burrows was at the college and her brother Fred came along and after our performance asked if I would audition for a new band. He said he really liked my cords - which I heard as chords - and as I only saw myself as a rhythm player I turned up for the audition with my 12 string acoustic.
We met in the rain in Picadilly and then got a bus out to a part of town I'd never heard of or visited - Hume. Great concrete crescents of flats - wind catchers - howling, deserted scoops of modernist housing. We arrived at Steve's door. The windows were boarded up, and on the wooden panels was scrawled 'do not remove boards till Friday'. The boards, and the scrawl, remained there throughout the three years I visited the flat.
After a wait and repeated knocking a bald and earringed head poked out of an upstairs window. A few minutes later, clad in the only clothes I think he owned - jeans and a black t-shirt - Steve let us in.
The audition got under way. When the phrase 'lead guitar' was mentioned I quickly explained I didn't do none of that stuff. In fact I had something of an aversion to it - shared, it seems, with many at the time. A guitar solo was a dreadful thing - belonging to Queen and Deep Purple. But Steve and Fred insisted I gave it a go, so they plugged in and Steve sang - well he did strange vocal things which were new to me. When Steve played and sang he had an unexpected aggression and menace. The man was mild mannered and very softly spoken. He always said 'Take care' as a signing off phrase, on the phone, or in person. But on the guitar he was like a scrubbing Lady Macbeth, with heavy guage strings and a claw-like left hand grip. Vocally he sneered and howled, his bird-like head on its long neck.
I have no idea what I played, but maybe Steve shared Fred's taste in trousers. I got the job.
Steve issued me with a cassette - it was Past and Parcel, in the order they appeared on the first album, played by him on an acoustic. With it was the complete set of song sheets. I sat with my cassette player night after night, playing along with the tape. I really worked hard at it. I'd never played someone else's music before and I didn't analyse it into the AABABB type structure I might now recognise. It was just a flux of melody, words and emotional sea-changes. I made up lead lines to fit in the non vocal spaces, and to run alongside some vocal lines. But I have no memory for lead lines - I think there are two distinctive types of guitarist and I am the type who thinks only in patterns and chords. But back then I hadn't defined my limitations so closely - or at least Fred and Steve weren't willing to allow me to do so.
So I came up with parts, but whenever I played with the band the notes would elude me and I'd stumble around, playing hide and seek with my preconceptions. I was very frustrated. Again, with maturity, I now know that in such a situation it is better to improvise completely.
My favourite experience in this Object Music time was one afternoon at Stuart Pickering's basement studio in Prestwich. I'm not sure why I was there, but Steve was overdubbing searing squawkings with an instrument he called the cacophone. I think it was in fact called a Shawn. Stuart's wife answered the door and showed a woman into the studio. She was a good six feet tall, with blond hair. She explained who she was, gesturing to Steve, who was on the other side of the glass. We nodded and smiled, but we couldn't understand a word - she was speaking in some Netherlandish language. Using international sign language we offered her a cup of tea, and Stuart went off to make it. The woman spoke volubly to me, gesticulating in a friendly manner. She produced a bunch of bananas. Well I don't know if there was something in the banana, but either she began speaking English or suddenly I understood Norwegian.
"I have been flying around this house for seven years, looking for a chance to land. There was so much confusion and electric interference. But today - as soon as I woke up - I knew I would make a landing. I am the Diva of Disco! I am the Rock Godess! I am ready to give over my spirit to this moment - to immortalise my atoms in magnetic tape - to finally be free of my earthly body and be particles of iron, magically energised with love. I am, above all, the Queen of Love!"
"Are you sure you've got the right house?" I asked.
"Certainty is for the gnomes, the slugs and small slow moving creatures. I Rejoice in Doubt! Now you must be silent and let me whirl my whole who-ness into a knot of nowness!"
And she began spinning, her skirt flouncing, her hair spreading out like a parasol. She turned and twirled (while Steve played on, on the other side of the glass) and she whirligigged. Fag ash was scattering across the console. Eventually she reached the speed of invisibility.
When Stuart returned with the tea I got a bollocking for getting ash all over his precious faders.
"Where did she go to?" he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
Steve played on.
In the early days Spherical Objects rehearsed around bassist Fred Burrows' house. The house was in Failsworth, in streets that looked exactly like those at the beginning of Coronation Street. It was a beautifully robust and chaotic household. Fred had two brothers and a sister, Inga. The whole family was exuberant and creative, and Inga was at Rochdale Art College, in the Foundation Year. I was on a course called 'Basic' retaking my o levels, escaping school. This one year age difference seemed huge - she was enigmatic and complex. She could also drink like no one I'd ever known. The bits I remember from the rehearsals are when I got a break and would go up to Inga's bedroom and we'd talk, or draw each other. She treated me with contempt and derided pretty much everything I said. I was entranced.
I think the only out of Town gig that the Objects ever did was at Eric's in Liverpool. Inga came along and, on the way back, in the darkness of the back of the car, she let me kiss her. The middle of the night, a humming motor, darkness and motion. I was lost.
Oh, and there was The Russell Club. We were supporting Howard Devoto's post Buzzcocks band Magazine. A steady shower of spit bathed me throughout our set. Steve turned on the audience. I can't remember what he said, but he had a slightly Headmasterish quality which amused me with its incongruity even in the middle of my dejection and revulsion at the situation. As soon as we got off stage I left the building and wandered the streets of Hume. Out there in the dark, leaning against a corrugated iron wall, was a scruffy trampish young man. He gave me a cigarette. I was just trying these things, and the vile taste and nauseating side effects were most welcome.
"You've not really got the idea, have you?" he said. "You need to play your guitar with bits of broken glass you found on the street, you need to smash up your telly and watch the empty screen, you need to make vodoo dolls of yourself and your sister and nail them together through the palms. You need to stop winding your watch, you need to fuck ghosts on the wet earth in the old graveyard. You need to wear eyeliner and mascara so people will notice you but not see you. You think you're building a future for yourself, but don't you know you're making a past." He gestured to the concrete labyrinths around us. "The architects were inspired when they built these, and a hundred years after someone knocks them down the archeologists will have a ball. But in the meantime us poor buggers have to live in them!"
He spat on the ground.
I spat on the ground.
I stood for some time, in front of this ruffian, trying to decide whether to go back to the club or not. Maybe they were hunting me for autographs. Maybe the spitting was a sign of adulation. In the other direction was the bus stop. I wonder what became of my guitar.
John Bisset - June 2008
The Things
Memories
Hmmm..
Well...Playing Drums with Jon the Postmans Purile at Electric Circus.
Joining Manchester Musicians Collective 78/79?
Attending MMC meeting at the Sawyers Arms, pub on Deansgate M/C.
Being asked or asking to play in the Mekon.
Being picked up by a Woman on a Motorbike, ooh er!!! and whisked off to sunny Withington.
Realizing my Drum style was rather a bit free form, shall we say, for the Mekon!
Improvising some vocals.
Playing my first gig as a vocalist at Band on the Wall with The Mekon,improv big style!!!
Then The Things, Steve Foster managing
Playing second most well attended gig at Band on the Wall,so I hear.
Blah blah etc
Tim
Trevor Wishart
I’ve got to that age where memory is beginning to be something of a problem.
What I do remember is that I was interested in establishing a musician’s collective in Manchester because I’d been involved in collectives in York and in attempts to set up a national musicians collectives.
What was interesting for me is that the previous collectives had always been an attraction largely for the free improvisation scene, whereas the establishment of the Manchester collective coincided with the newly emerging band scene in Manchester, so there were lots of people from the band scene, many with virtually no place to rehearse. I remember Mark E. Smith turning up to one of the evenings in the North West Arts basement, and I’ve always been impressed by his commitment to what he does, and his anti-celebrity stance. I also remember putting on ‘Menagerie’ (photo-slides of montages by various performance artists, with my accompanying soundtracks) at a Jazz venue in Manchester around the same time, and have a vague memory (you can probably correct me) of running a musical games session in the collective space. Since then life has gone off in entirely other directions, but I’m still involved in vocal free improvisation at various sound-poetry festivals around Europe. I never did make it into a band!!
TREVOR WISHART
