DAVE STEWART

Part 1

Dave Stewart has long been one of the most loved and respected musicians this country has produced. The intelligence and care with which he tackles his musical outpouring is as evident today as when he first recorded with Egg, way back in 1968. Here at Terrascope Towers we were understandably overjoyed when the venerable Mr. Stewart agreed to guide us through his long and colourful career - especially when he offered to write the thing himself in his own inimitable style. Here then is the first part of what promises to be a classic treat over the coming months for all you fans of Egg, Hatfield & The North, National Health, Bruford and the Canterbury scene in general....

THE START OF MY CAREER -

1968 - 1972/3

I went to a public (= private) school called The City Of London School. You didn't have to be particularly posh to go to this school, but your parents had to be pretty rich to meet the fees. My parents were pretty poor, but I circumvented the commercial considerations by winning a scholarship. This, and getting a No. 1 single in 1981, were the highest achievements of my life according to my mum - all the bits before and in between have been crap.

Anyway, at the aforementioned C.of L.S. I met two extraordinary oiks named Steve Hillage and Hugo Martin Mongomery-Campbell, like me ink-bespattered, vaguely rebellious, academically unfocussed and interested in music. I can still remember Steve Hillage in short trousers and a cap, but have managed to resist the temptation to sketch them in, in biro, on his album covers.

I was an embryonic guitar-twanger when I met these guys, but Steve was so far ahead of me in that field (his parents had bought him a Strat and an AC30, and he could play barre chords) that I soon gave it up in favour of the organ. Mont played bass, guitar, piano and eveything else and he and Steve formed a band, in the 6th form (1967). I was desperate to join, and made myself indispensible by helping them carry their amps etc. We were into Cream/Hendrix, the Blues, progressive and psychedelic stuff - I was particularly into the Nice. Steve used to do a lot of guitar solos and we used to do versions of 'Foxy Lady', 'Rondo' (for me), innumerable Fleetwood Mac/Cream songs and no original material! We were pretty much a school band, but not a bad one. and we found a drummer (East Ender Clive Brooks) through an ad. in Melody Maker. The day we auditioned Clive, Steve and Mont went out for a coffee - we were rehearsing in an office block in Baker St. where Mont's dad used to work - and met Jimi Hendrix in the street. He was staring at the window of the Beatles' 'Apple' shop, and Steve approached him and asked him to come up and have a play with us. He was very nice about it, but said he was too busy....

I wish he'd had a bit more time!

Uriel (for that was the name of our band) did a few youth club type gigs but then, in the summer of '68, we got our BIG BREAK. A totally trustworthy gentleman called Johnny Quinn offered us a residency at the Ryde Castle Hotel on the Isle of Wight. We'd get to play every night, free accommodation and a chance to rehearse in the venue every afternoon. Actually, the landlady of the hotel, a venerable woman named Mrs. Ross, took one look at Steve and Mont's bare feet and afro hair and refused us permission to even enter the hotel during daylight hours. We ended up sleeping in the van and having to rehearse silently (difficult!), but we managed to knock up one or two original tunes, written by Mont - "Egoman" is one title I remember.

The Ryde Castle Hotel gig was basically shit, but we got to support Arthur Brown and Fairport Convention. At the end of the summer, Steve Hillage said he was quitting to go to university. A shame, for as Clive Brooks remarked to me in later years, "If Steve had stayed, by now we'd be as good as the Mahavishnu Orchestra"... think he's right, readers?

As a trio, Uriel dropped all their blues numbers and began to develop a more classical leaning with Mont's polytonal harmonies and my sub-Emerson light classical bits. We fell in with Middle Earth, the psychedelic club in Covent Garden, and got to play there every fortnight supporting the likes of Captain Beefheart and Love Sculpture. The "managers" of Middle Earth, two semi-likeable chaps called Dave and Paul, started an agency and offered to manage us. One condition- we had to change our name. 'Uriel' was too weird and, get this, apparently sounded too much like 'URINAL'!!!

And so, Egg was born. We hated the name, but it was popular with typesetters. We started to get more gigs (probably because the posters were so cheap - I remember doing a gig at the Doncaster Top Rank Suite where the bill was 'Yes', 'If' and 'Egg' - a coincidence? Surely not. We blew Yes off the stage, incidentally...)

Egg was part of the Middle Earth package of bands that included 'The Writing On The Wall' (who did an absolutely brilliant opening number where the singer used to stand on the organ and leap off), and Decca Records were offered this package for an intended Middle Earth label. I don't know whether Dave and Paul ever got the label started, but Decca approached us separately (I guess they must have done a demo. Where is that now?!?) and said they wanted to sign us.

By now we were doing all "original" material, although some of it was nicked from Stravinsky, Holst etc, and we were reconciled to being an organ trio. At first we missed the guitar, but after auditioning a bit we realised not many guitarists were as good as Steve so we decided not to replace him with an inferior model. We did at least two BBC Radio sessions - best one was the Pete Drummond Show - and a BBC2 television show called 'Colour Me Pop' (!) presented by Michael Parkinson.

At the time of recording our first LP ('Egg' - wotta title!) for Decca things were going well and the band was growing in popularity. It continued to improve for a year or so, but then after recording 'The Polite Force' album Decca told us they didn't want to release it. Why, then, had they let us record it? Because someone in the sales/marketing department had failed to speak to someone in the contracts dept. presumably; but attempt to understand the workings of record company's employees' minds and you'll end up as mad as they are. This is the worst thing you can do to a band though - let them sweat blood over recording an album they're really proud of, with all its false starts, nerves, anxiety, eventual triumphant completion of good backing tracks, hours of overdubbing, problems with headphones, more nerves, the occasional brilliant bit of playing, arguments about the mix, persuading the drummer the snare's loud enough, getting through the mix without fucking up, making sure all the mixes are the right level, sorting out the running order - and then say, "Oh, by the way - we're not putting it out". This has happened to my friend Jakko THREE TIMES. No wonder he's a little cynical about the record business. [The redoubtable Jakko was also encountered within the Nick Haeffner interview last issue - Ed.]

Although Decca eventually changed their corporate mind, persuaded partly by our producer Neil Slaven who was a Decca employee, the blow to band morale was quite bad, and it coincided with gigs beginning to dry up. We had no contacts outside Britain, which meant we had to concentrate on touring this wretched little island where, in truth, not enough people care about music that is a bit...uh...weird, or different at least. Finally we fell in with a bod called Roy Fisher who was manager of that venerable blues organisation, The Groundhogs. Pete's brother had, in fact, formerly been a member of the band. Despite the stunning incompatibility of our musical styles, we were stuck out on tour together doing the Colston, Free Trade, Birmingham Town, Newcastle Town Hall sort of venue - the Groundhogs headlining, of course. Tony McPhee was friendly enough in a gruff kind of way, but he got a bit cross when closely questioned on how come our soundchecks only lasted 3 minutes.

My memories of that era are quite strong. The bit in 'Spinal Tap' where they get lost trying to find the stage is particularly funny to me, as exactly that happened to me in some big Sheffield civic institution. Three minutes before the gig, I wandered off for a piss. 10 minutes later, I was still in the bowels of the building, clambering over packing crates, pieces of disused scenery from Norman Wisdom's 'Aladdin' show circa 1958, etc. I thought I could hear the crowd jeering and booing, but it might have been the civic plumbing. "The show must go on!", eh? How?

The gigs with the 'Hogs sort of toughened us up. It's like, you go into Green's Playhouse, Glasgow (now The Apollo) a dilettante, pretentious youth concerned about ART, and you come out a MAN ready to ROCK & ROLL and start a FOOD FIGHT at the BLUE BOAR. On one of the tours, Egg and The Groundhogs were joined by a great Welsh outfit called Quicksand - to be honest, they were the best band on the bill. But the 'Hogs always went down the best, generally provoking a sort of Pavlovian screaming riot that I found a bit disturbing. Tony McPhee and Ken (the drummer) seemed to be totally unaware of it, they just spent the whole time complaining about the monitors and how their "amps" were "crap".

Let's leave Egg for a bit and talk about ARZACHEL who, as everyone now knows, were Uriel operating under a pseudonym. Uriel never did any recording, for the simple reason that we didn't have any original material - we were only schoolboys, remember. However, as soon as Egg had signed to Decca Records, the possibility of a Uriel LP came up. What happened was, we knew a chap called Peter Wicker who ran a demo studio called "Studio 19" in Gerrard St, Soho. He had some connections with a foreigner named "Zak" who was running a label called "Zel" (or was it the other way round?) Anyway, Zak had noticed (somewhat belatedly) that "psykodalic" music was shifting a lot of units, so he asked Wicker to be on the lookout for a likely bunch of lads who knew how to make a noise. We had worked for Peter in his demo studio, thusly: An aspiring songwriter would send a cassette of his or her song with a view to having it "professionally" recorded. Peter would ring us up and we would attempt to work out the chords and bang out a version, with Mont handling the vocals. Unfortunately some of our efforts were so approximate that the client demanded his money back, but that's showbiz!! Again though, WHERE ARE THOSE TAPES NOW?!?

Peter alerted us to the possibility of making a psychedelic album for Zak's label, and we were keen. Problem was, we'd signed an exclusive deal with Decca some weeks previously. Hence, the psudonym. We drafted Steve Hillage (by now a student at Kent University) in to add psychedelic noise atmosphere and further disguise the Egg-ness of the project. The songs on Side One were specially written for the LP. Side Two was a "psychedelic jam" (a style we were expert in after many hours spent at the Middle Earth club) with nothing much pre-arranged except that it had to be long enough to fill the side - we actually held the last chord on for ages while watching the studio clock tick round; as soon as it hit the quarter past, we stopped playing.

The budget - including our advance - was £250. We recorded and mixed it in one afternoon. We didn't know anything about recording, so if it sounds underwater it wasn't really anyone's fault. All I knew was, put some reverb on the organ!

I'm surprised that anyone ever got interested in this LP, because we only gave it about 10 minutes thought. It was supposed to be a secret, but a guy called Philip - friend of "Jesus" (nee Bill Jellet, he of the white kaftan and nuts and berries - Bill was a good mate of ours) - got to know about it and told Melody Maker the sordid facts. I guess we would have owned up in time, but we were pissed off with Philip at the time.

Anyway, back at Egg. Following the Groundhogs tour, things got tough. We had enough material for a third album, but no deal and very few gigs. Mont decided to call it a day, as he was getting into a kind of spiritual quest that would not be enhanced by endless trips up and down the M1, even with the incentive of a fry-up at the Blue Boar thrown in. Clive and I were very upset at Mont's decision, but we didn't try to argue with him as we sort of sensed he'd made up his mind, and anyway, even if he'd stayed, we had no work! Clive had the idea of asking Hugh Hopper to join, but at that stage I didn't have the confidence to contemplate becoming the main writer in the group - traditionally Mont's role - so the band split up.

Future events were to partly compensate for the lack of interest that led to the band's demise, as in 1974 we got the opportunity to reform the band for the album 'The Civil Surface'. This effectively mopped up the unrecorded material from the post-Polite Force era, though we had to pad it out a little with some wind quartets Mont had written - not really Egg material! Although the mix on the 'Civil Surface' is a bit naff, (we couldn't persuade Clive that the drums were loud enough) I'm really glad we recorded 'Enneagram', one of my favourite Egg pieces. We used to steam through that at gigs - our opening number - and peoples' faces would drop.

As for Steve Hillage's career around this time - within minutes of leaving Uriel and setting foot in the hallowed portals of Kent University (which is, of course in CANTERBURY, hours of waffle about which will come later), Steve had met singer Barbara Gaskin, now my recording partner and sweetheart. For this I am eternally grateful to him. Steve was apparently under the impression that universities were brimming with brilliant musicians waiting for the opportunity to fling aside their copies of "The Medium Is The Message" by Marshall McCluhan, seize bass guitars or drum kits and lock immediately into a tight groove over which Steve would extemporize brilliant Stratocaster solos. Meeting Barbara was a good start, but the perfect rhythm section Steve had dreamed of was not to be found on the campus. After a year of abortive study (which all too frequently mutated into Occupying The Refectory and other popular student sports of the late 60's, such as Berating The Administration and Organising The Folk Club) - he packed it all in and came back to London to start his own band, 'Khan'.

Khan were "managed" by Terry King, who also managed, or at least took money from, Caravan. Steve found a good rhythm section in Eric Peachey (drums) and Nick Greenwood (bass - ex-Crazy World of Arthur Brown), but he never seemed to settle on the right organist. There was a chap called Dick, a nice enough guy and a good keyboard player, but there were some problems; apparently his girlfriend wouldn't let him do gigs on Sundays because that was the day she liked to cook him a special dinner. Or something. Anyway, by the time Khan came round to doing their 1st LP (again for good old Decca) no permanent organist had been found, so I did it as a guest musician. I was in Egg at the time, but was happy to play on the LP because I liked Steve and his songs. Eric Peachey was a great guy, too. He had long blonde hair and a really long ginger beard, so all you could see was this permanent smile. He also wore really bright coloured towelling socks that I have subsequently adopted as a personal fashion myself. (No, no - this kind of stuff is important!)

It is a fact that, after Egg split up in 1972, I joined Khan as a full-time member - but this was shortlived. We did a handful of gigs, after which Steve broke the band up. It was a lot of pressure on him - 3 organists and 2 bassists in two years is a lot when you're trying to rehearse complex arrangements - and he would stay up all night writing the charts. Terry King's management had a strong leaning towards the you-do-all-the-work and I'll-take-the-commission style, and I always thought his permanent suntan made an interesting contrast with Steve's deathly pallor. So it wasn't a big surprise when Steve announced to us that he was off to France to play guitar with Kevin Ayers, and Khan was to be "diskhantinued".

This unsurprising development left me out of work, with no immediate prospects for musical employment. How I filled the intervening months before a casual call from drummer Pip Pyle changed my life is perhaps best not discussed on the pages of a musical magazine read by, I imagine, sensitive artistic types; suffice it to say that society in general and casual employment agencies in particular have dreamed up unimaginable tortures and humiliations for the unemployed organist "resting" between engagements.

Next issue: Hatfield & the North

Written and produced by Dave Stewart

Copyright Dave Stewart, 1989.

Engineered by Mick Dillingham

Typed up by McMuff

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