DAVE STEWART

Part 2

Hatfield and The North, and later National Health, were responsible for producing some of the most innovative, complex, majestic and downright entertaining rock music ever to come out of England. It was largely down to the presence of composer and musician Dave Stewart in each of these legendary combos that kept them outside of the jazz conventions they veered towards and enabled exploration of the more adventurous realms of rock music that they became justly renowned for. In this second part of the self-penned Dave Stewart Story, Dave steers us through the rocky waters of the Music Business of the 70's, and in particular his part in the story of Hatfield And The North...

HATFIELD & THE NORTH 1973 - '75

After Egg split up, I spent some time doing menial jobs. These were mostly of a cruel and arbitrary nature, stuff that nobody else wanted to do: delivering mattresses to unbuilt hotel rooms, stuffing envelopes with invitations to sporting events that had taken place three weeks previously - that sort of thing. All very Kafka-esque, and rather depressing. I was living in a horrible house in South London with a bunch of bastards whose idea of communal living was to label the milk bottles "Kim's" or "Anne's" and draw up endless charts showing whose turn it was to do the washing up. It was usually mine. Was this how the rest of my life was to be?

Evidently not, because one day I got a call from a chap I vaguely knew called Pip Pyle. The line was bad and Pip tends to mumble down the 'phone, but I picked out "...new band... gig... at the moment... Dave Sinclair..... Hammond organ...... tape......". This sounded promising, so I invited Pip over to elucidate. When he arrived, he played me a tape of some of the most incomprehensible music I had ever heard, and studied my reaction keenly. This was, apparently, an early gig tape of Hatfield & The North with Dave Sinclair playing organ, but the sound quality was so terrible I couldn't hear anything. "Sounds interesting", I lied. we arranged for me to cart my Hammond over to Phil Miller's flat in Richmond so we could have a play.

There I met Richard Sinclair and Phil, both of whom I was vaguely acquainted with, and we bashed through 'Nan True's Hole' and some other tunes. At the end of the audition, Pip said to me smilingly "Well Dave, I think it's fair to say that you're in the group now", at which point Phil butted in with "I don't think it's fair to say that at all!" and the two of them went off into the kitchen and had a row. I later learned that this row, or variations of it, had been going on since they were eighteen months old, as they had both grown up together in the same Hertfordshire village. The conflict was probably originally based on the misappropriation of some toy or another. As it's now 1989 and the two of them still play in a band together, I think it lends weight to the theory that the most durable partnerships are ones where the partners can let off a little steam.

Anyway, I never found out whether I got the gig or not, because before this larger issue could be settled Pip said they had a gig on Friday, and could I do it. This meant learning over an hour's worth of music, played without a break a la Matching Mole, in two days. Being a true professional, game old trouper, seasoned veteran, hardened campaigner, tough cookie, consummate entertainer and above all a STUPID BASTARD, I agreed. We played the gig, at South Morden College of Anaesthetists (or somewhere), I bluffed my way through (constantly scrutinizing dozens of sheets of manuscript paper and wondering where we'd got to), stopping occasionally when I got too lost, and the first hurdle was crossed.

I discovered that I was stepping into a slot previously occupied by Phil's brother Steve, as well as Dave Sinclair, but it turned out that although the lads preferred the fuller organ sound to the lighter electric piano approach of Steve Miller, their real role model for the Hatfield keyboardist was Dave MacRae, ex- Matching Mole. I realised that in order tpo fulfil the band's expectations, I was going to have to do two things: (1) Get an electric piano, and (2) learn to play jazz, or something close.

I must come clean at this point and say I am not a big jazz fan. I can appreciate, and sometimes enjoy, the musicianship involved, but there are too many conventions involved for me to really get off on it. On the other hand though, I had reached the stage where I needed to broaden my musical horizons a little. The neo-classical precision of Egg had given me enough technique to play most written rock music, but my improvising and ability to respond to what other musicians were playing needed to be worked on. I figured that playing with Hatfield and The North would help me develop a bit in those areas, and if the results were a little jazzier than what I was used to, it wasn't the end of the world... and it was certainly better than delivering mattresses.

The electric piano problem was solved by an incredible piece of good luck. Pip had met Simon Draper and Richard Branson, who were about to start up Virgin Records. Simon liked what he heard of Hatfield (surely not the cassette Pip had played me? Jesus Christ...) and wanted to SIGN THE BAND UP! There you go; unbelievable, isn't it? You start up a band playing uninterrupted riffs for an hour with two other blokes playing crazed solos over the top, play in a couple of technical colleges and the next thing you know two incipient moguls show up and start asking how much money you want to record an LP of this stuff. Those were the "good old days". If only it was like that now...

I quite liked Richard Branson when I first met him. He invited us to his houseboat and played us 'Tubular Bells', which I told him would never sell. He also settled a dispute over whether Virgin should get our publishing or not, by challenging us to a game of darts in a local pub. We lost. All the music I wrote from 1973 to 1978 is still owned by Virgin Music. Subsequently, I have come to dread his seemingly nightly T.V. appearances - so, his latest boat/balloon/aeroplane has crashed in the Irish Sea? Why is this fucking NEWS? - and have watched with horror his burgeoning association with Margaret Thatcher, which will probably end up with him becoming Minister of the Arts. I also realise that Richard doesn't like music very much, except as a premise from which to go on and make more money. But back then, he was only a proto-mogul, and compared to some of the miserable old motherfuckers I'd known at Decca (who had names like Sir William Waldegrave and Lord Henry Fitzgerald Montgomery-Mountbattenshire) he didn't seem a bad type.

One of the early group rows was about how to split up the advance money. I think we had about £2,000 to spend on equipment. Half of that went immediately on a "Zoot Horn" P.A. system, some more on a dodgy old van, until there was only about £800 left. The others insisted that I take £400 and buy a Fender Rhodes electric piano, even though my share should really have been only £200. They went on and on about it, and, as I said earlier, it seemed a necessary item for this band. Finally, I relented, though feeling bad about the inequality of the split. "Look, I appreciate you wanting me to have this piano", I explained "and I'll get it, but only on one condition. After I've had it a few months, I'll probably get really attached to it, so if the group breaks up I don't want you coming round asking for it back." There was a solid consensus of agreement on this, some hand-shaking, back-slapping and other solemn male bonding rituals.

Two years later, when the band split up, Pip phoned me up. "It's about that Fender Rhodes. I reckon you should sell it and give me half the money. You had more of the advance than I did."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!

I'll leave it to the critics to discuss the merits of Hatfield's music, but there were some elements in it that I loved. Mainly, it was the sense of humour. The bit on the first album where the listener gets lost and rushes from speaker to speaker opening doors in an attempt to find the next track is great. Lots of musicians get mad stoned ideas like this, but very few of them actually record them. Although we presented our live set fairly seriously, there was an element of absurdity there too... Once, in a Dutch club, we filed out on stage and were poised to play our first number. But first, our roadie took this ridiculous little green plastic duck with a spring inside it and a sticky rubber pad on the bottom, and stuck it to the floor at the front of the stage. We even shone a light on it. The idea is that after a while, the rubber pad loses its grip and the duck leaps about 4 foot up in the air.... We sat staring at this thing raptly for about three minutes, and only went it finally went "sprooing" did I count in the first tune.

For a certain period - I don't know why - Pip and I were really into smashing garden gnomes on stage. He used to do the actual smashing (it suited his temperament), but I was a willing accomplice, setting aside portions of the group's income for the procurement of gnomes and hammers. After soundchecks, Phil and Richard would retire to the dressing room to tune their guitars (a process I've seen Phil make last about 4 hours) but Pip and I would be off in search of a garden centre. It was sometimes difficult to explain to the assistants why we preferred gnomes that you could smash easily ("but Sir, this model will last you a lifetime!"), but it kept us amused.

For variation, we once invited the Northettes, who were singing with us at a gig at the Roundhouse in London, to do the gnome smashing. Barbara Gaskin was dead against the idea, on the grounds that it was destructive. I explained the whole quintessential point of the thing was its mindless destructiveness, and, though unconvinced, she agreed to deal the death blows. Took her about three tries, though... These were good quality concrete gnomes, not your cheap plaster rubbish. Sometimes, when no gnomes were available, we'd use teapots instead, by now addicted to the sound of cheap pointless consumer goods being ritually destroyed, and the satisfying crunch of plaster or porcelain fragments underfoot afterwards. The whole thing reached a horrifying climax at a gig we played with Gong, where Pip smashed up a whole tea service and about 6 gnomes. You can imagine how Daevid Allen felt about this. As the 4th or 5th gnome's head left its shoulders, a splinter of gnome material leapt up and gashed open Pip's forehead, just above the eye. It bled quite a bit, and after the gig Daevid came up to him and said "well, smashing up gnomes and teapots - what do you expect?".

Most of our gigs took place outside of Britain, with the emphasis on France and Holland. Richard's presence in the band helped endear us to the Dutch, who were Caravan-crazy. This caused problems once or twice when unscrupulous promoters actually billed us as "Caravan". In France, where Soft Machine and Gong were like deities, having Phil (who'd played with Robert Wyatt) and Pip (Gong's drummer at the peak of their French popularity) in our ranks swiftly established us as a fixture in their maisons de la culture. We used to draw pretty good crowds and the French, especially, seemed to like us. Britain was, as usual, more difficult. Although the audiences could be great, gigs were always scarcer and less well paid than those in Europe.

I am very happy with the two albums Hatfield put out, but I felt our live performances were inconsistent. This is perhaps inevitable if you include as much improvisation as we did, but from time to time the looseness and spontaneity would degenerate into a weak, amateurish performance that embarrassed me. This was nobody's fault, but there seemed to be a fragility to our group psyche. We'd go on stage confident, but then a monitor would start feeding back or something and we'd go to pieces. One such gig was the Rainbow Theatre farewell concert, where we played with a few other bands... although the track 'Halfway Between Heaven & Earth' was O.K. (it was recorded, with a new lead vocal added later, and was featured on the 'Over The Rainbow' compilation LP) the rest of the gig was terrible and we came off stage feeling really depressed. This happened more than was comfortable, and although we often went on to do a really steaming gig the next night, you never knew when the Duff Gig Phenomenon would strike again.

Partly as a reaction to this, I began to write music for the band that was quite tightly controlled and scored. Though it was unlike their own music, the rest of the band were happy to have a go at it, and although it meant we had to rehearse a bit more, we started to include some of these more complex pieces in our live set. It was interesting to compare the difference of approach between my compositions and Richard Sinclair's - whereas my stuff was all written out and pre-arranged, Richard very rarely presented a finished song, preferring to play through a few chord sequences until he'd la-la'd a vocal tune. The band would throw in some arrangement ideas, and Pip might write some words, and finally (usually a few hours before a gig or recording session) the song would be completed. On paper, these two approaches are incompatible, but in practice they contrasted really well and gave the band some depth.

Once our first album had been released (and not sold too brilliantly) we realised that we were never going to make any money out of the band. We had no manager, and somehow in the Virgin negotiations we'd given away all our earning power by letting them recoup both our recording and writer' royalties against our recording debt. (Virgin, despite their initial hippie-ish appearance, soon became notorious in the industry for their unfair deals) So, all our recording income was being witheld by Virgin to set against a bill run up in the Manor studios, owned by... Virgin.

Any gig money seemed to go on repairing the van or the P.A., both of which broke down regularly on alternate weeks. We were on the breadline, and no mistake. The person hit hardest by this was Richard (no, not Branson, stupid!) He and Pip both had families, but whereas Pip had wealthy parents who would occasionally bung him a bit of money or a gross of rusks, Richard had no financial cushion. We went to Virgin and pleaded with them to ease up a bit on the deal, at least release our publishing (ie writers') royalties so we could afford luxuries like food and rent. In a fit of unparalleled generosity which must have put a strain on their capital resources, they gave us all £50 a week for a whole month. Somehow though, despite this huge handout, we still contrived to stay poor - typical shiftless musicians.

Though we managed to extricate our writers' royalties from 'The Rotters' Club' (the band's 2nd album) things were still desperate, and at one stage things got really serious for Richard - his wife had a 6 week old baby and they had nowhere to live. They stayed in a squat in Croydon for a while, but got chucked out of there. For a time there was even the possibility that the kids might have to be taken into care; I don't remember the details, but it was pretty grim. Throughout this, Virgin's attitude remained the same. "If you want money", Carol Wilson, then head of Virgin Music, said to me, "you should get a proper job, like mine".
Thanks, Carol.

'The Rotters' Club' sold little better than its predecessor, and given the incredibly bleak financial circumstances, it was small wonder that the group cracked up. There were other factors, too. We used to have a lot of rows, understandable if you look at our different personalities and how young we were. We all liked each other, but that didn't stop us having the odd screaming argument. Unfortunately, Richard would sometimes continue, or begin, the argument on stage, berating Pip for not listening to what he was playing or making a deliberately ugly noise on his bass instead of playing the bass line. This didn't happen much, but it disturbed me badly. I had this 'the show must go on somehow, even if we're all having brain seizures' attitude, which I felt was the least we could do for an audience who had paid good money to see us. When it became obvious that Richard's sporadic stage outbursts weren't going to stop, and that his difficult personal situation was making him increasingly disaffected with the music, I thought it was time to quit.

Richard Branson asked me to start up a new Hatfield & The North with new musicians, since ironically there was some American interest in the band and Virgin had found an outlet over there. I told him no thanks; he evidently had no understanding of how a group works, and seemed to think I was the best bet out of the four of us because I was the "together" one who did the accounts. But there was no way any one of us could claim the band name, as like our slightly more successful predecessors The Beatles, we were very much a sum of the parts.

I was in the band for two and a half years, from early 1973 to 1975. we did at least two BBC radio sessions for John Peel, a couple of French TV shows and had our awful gig at the Rainbow filmed. I only got to see this in 1988, in Tokyo, where some rabid Japanese fans had somehow unearthed the clip. It featured the same tune "Halfway Between Heaven and Earth" featured on the 'Over The rainbow' album, the only decent song of an abysmal set. I was amused to see the video Richard la-la-la-ing while his audio self sang a set of lyrics penned some time after the gig - the miracles of modern science, eh! Modern day fans of Hatfield are always asking me if any gig tapes exist, and I'm sure there are a few around which have ended up on bootleg cassettes etc, but basically the answer is "no". Pip had a very rough tape of two French gigs from which we selected 2 sections for inclusion on our retrospective 'Afters' compilation LP, but we all felt the rest of the material was naff. I don't know what happened to these tapes, and archivists will no doubt continue to torture themselves speculating, but there are no Hatfield & The North major compositions lying around unrecorded. Unlike National Health, the band that followed in the wake of these poverty-stricken days (which, looking back through the gnome dust, seem increasingly like a golden era) Hatfield and The North got to record all their favourite tunes.

As a postscript to my Hatfield reminiscences, I should point out that I also did the following things while in the band:

a) Rejoined my former Egg colleagues Mont Campbell and Clive Brooks to record 'The Civil Surface'

b) Appeared as a guest (suitably depicted in Tibetan wooly hat) on Fish Hillage's 'Steve Rising' album, which made up a bit for Khan's premature demise

c) Met Robert Wyatt - who used to be married to Pip's wife Pam - and played a concert with him at London's Drury Lane Theatre. Enjoyed the gig, but smashed my thumb during rehearsals fiddling with the hinged back part of Robert's Minimoog. Ouch!

d) Met Alan Gowen, an extremely affable keyboard player who went on to become one of my best mates. At this time, he was living in Barnes, just up the road from pip's flat in Sheen, and had got to know Phil and Richard. Alan had his own band Gilgamesh, and wrote a special 'double quartet' piece for them and Hatfield to co-perform at Leeds Art College (I think - where Alan's girlfriend Celia was an ex-student) and in London (can't remember where). Very enjoyable. When things started getting dodgy with Hatfield, Alan and I started muttering about how one day we would get a band together. That day arrived sooner than we anticipated - Hatfield played their last gig at 'The Winning Post' (huh) in Chertsey in 1975, and I set off back to the paddock to start plans for the new Stewart/Gowen supergroup, 'National Health'.

Next issue, Dave guides us through 'the inside story' of National Health.

Written and produced by Dave Stewart

Copyright Dave Stewart, 1989.

Engineered by Mick Dillingham

Typed up by McMuff

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