DAVE STEWART

Part 3

Regular readers will have been following Dave Stewart's self-penned story of his career through Urial, Egg, and Hatfield & The North with mounting interest. This issue, Dave takes us through the story of that fine old British institution, National Health....
 

NATIONAL HEALTH - THE INSIDE STORY

I am myopic, but my memory is good and I remember clearly that the band was named after my spectacles (cheap 'National Health' round frames, now wildly popular in Japan for some reason) in that cheery way musicians have of celebrating physical defects. God knows what the band would have been called if I'd had a hernia or worn an artificial limb...

1975 was a difficult year to be a thinking rock musician - the halcyon years of 'progressive' rock, when musicians were actually encouraged to be creative and original, were over, and the music industry had gone into a horrid kind of two year gestation period which was to end with the birth of 'punk'. In other words, at the exact point when the British rock business and media were beginning to turn their backs on decent music and gearing themselves up to promote instead some of the most crass, simplistic, brutal, ugly and stupid music imaginable, in an atmosphere where an admitted inability to play one's instrument was hailed as a sign of genius, Alan Gowen and I decided to form a large-scale rock ensemble playing intricate, mainly instrumental music. You can be sure we weren't doing it to be fashionable.

Our original grandiose ideas for 'The National Health', formulated over the course of several drunken evenings at Alan's flat and based to some degree on those previous enjoyable collaborations between Gilgamesh and the Hatfields, were for a nine-piece band; 2 keyboards, 2 guitars, 3 vocalists, bass and drums. Alan was to play electric piano and synthesiser (the latter an instrument on which he showed astonishing prowess despite not actually owning one) and myself Hammond organ, electric piano and pianet. We would both compose, and the band would attempt to blend my heavily scored music with Alan's more improvisational pieces. We both wanted to include Phil Miller and Phil Lee (the guitarists from our previous bands) and I invited the bassist/composer Mont Campbell from Egg to join as well. This gave us, in July 1975, the nucleus of National Health Mk. 1. I wanted to add vocalists Amanda Parsons, Barbara Gaskin and Ann Rosenthal too, but circumstances, and the intervention of a small amount of common sense, dictated that only Amanda could join, making the band a 7-piece.

"Drummer wanted. Must be able to play well in unusual time signatures." ran our advertisment in Melody Maker. The amount of trouble we had in finding a suitable drummer for the group still surprises and depresses me. The obvious choice would have been Pip Pyle, but I wanted to do something different with National Health and was concerned that with three ex-members it would turn into Hatfield Mk. 2. So, we advertised. It was hell. After receiving the usual barrage of calls from senile percussionists seeking gigs on cruise ships, guitarists (not quite unable to read, but wondering whether we needed a guitarist as well), axe murderers, contortionists and trapeze artists, and having resisted the temptation to scream obscenities down the 'phone at an insanely confident 14 year old who called me every day for a week pleading for the gig, we auditioned 25 or so applicants - some of them 'names'.

They were all absolutely pathetic. I was amazed at how any of them had acquired any sort of a reputation, as they all seemed to be completely thrown by our music and unable to play along with it in even the most rudimentary way. I guess the time signatures, which shifted constantly, were the biggest stumbling block; to me and the other embryonic Healthsters they seemed totally natural, but they reduced most of the visitors to our rehearsal space (Alan's front room in Tooting) to a flailing mess of uncoordinated limbs, quivering flesh and dropped sticks.

Fortunately, someone at Virgin Records had given Bill Bruford my 'phone number, and after dragging a wary Alan Gowen along to a couple of meetings wherein Bill explained to me and my suspicious partner why it was OK to have been in a group that sold a lot of records, we arranged to have a play together. The first rehearsal went very well - Bill could read music, so our complex arrangements held no terrors for him. We liked his confident style and complete absence of flared trousers, and he seemed to appreciate that we could all more or less get a tune out of our instruments. It was never going to be a permanent arrangement, as Bill had other commitments and was looking eventually to form his own group, but at least we had a drummer to complete the first line up of National Health.

We had absolutely no idea of how we were going to earn a living (in fact, we never did) but at least we had a band now. Encouraged, we began to rehearse a plethora of new compositions. I had written a daft, insanely long piece called 'The Lethargy Shuffle' (actually named after a stupid dance Pip Pyle and I had devised in a Belgian disco one evening) which parodied Glenn Miller and rock'n'roll while maintaining Stravinskyan overtones, plus a more lyrical song in Hatfield style entitled 'Clocks and Clouds'. Alan wrote the delicate, mobile 'Brujo' which, unlike my pieces, had opportunites for group improvisation, and another complex piece called 'Bells'. Mont Campbell, who had been out of the music scene for a while, dusted off his chops and rattled off 'Paracelsus' (beautiful, contrapuntal sections), 'Agrippa' (which sounded like the soundtrack of a mad film in which gigantic mud creatures trudge through primal estuaries) and the demented 'Zabaglione', which is probably the hardest piece of music I've ever played live, and which I shall not attempt to describe. Not to be outdone (you want complex? I got complex!) I wrote 'Tenemos Roads', an epic about ancient civilisations on the planet Mercury inspired by 'The Worm Crouborous'. The Ramones we were not.

Armed with this fearsome repertoire (and a few others such as 'Trident Asleep' by Alan Gowen and 'Starlight on Seaweed' by Mont Campbell) we set out in January 1976 to terrify the youth of Britain in technical college canteens, leisure centre gymnasiums and all the other unsuitable venues which in this country pass for auditoria. But first, before even stepping on stage, we ran into the first of the 8 billion or so problems that seemed to dog the band throughout its life. Phil Lee, sensing perhaps my residual hostility to bebop solos, pronounced himself unwilling to continue, and departed to undertake a tour backing French singer Charles Aznavour (promptly and cruelly christened "'Asnovoice" by the rest of the band). Fortunately, we were able to call in old mate Steve Hillage on strategic dates to play his parts, but this left us with a temporary drummer and very temporary second guitarist. And, for a while, no singer: Amanda Parsons caught 'flu and missed most of the gigs, including our first London concert.

After the first tour Mont Campbell left, having been forcibly reminded of the things that first caused him to quit the rock scene in 1973 (the essentially unspiritual nature of motorway food, the jam sessions at soundchecks where everyone plays a lot of crap, the terrible jokes in the van...) But that was the least of our worries. We were now ready to record our first LP, and though the press rapturously received our winter gigs we had run into a wall of indifference from British record companies. Alan and I had thought that finding a record deal for this band would be easy. How wrong we were...

Following countless refusals and rejections, things reached a head when Virgin Records turned us down. I had a furious argument with some wretched A&R individual over the reasons. Apparently our music was old fashioned and "unoriginal". "What do you mean, 'unoriginal'?" I screamed, "tell me who else is playing this kind of thing?" "Er, plenty of people. It just sounds like what a lot of other bands have done..."

Oh yeah? What Virgin had rightly divined, of course, was that this band had MUSICIANS in it, and by some unspoken inter record-company edict that persists to this day, had decreed that musicians were bad news and bands which sported them were NOT TO BE SIGNED. Far better to sign up some good-looking front person who's not particularly interested in music (like the record company) and replace the band, if there is one, with session players or machines. Then you can get down to the real business of making a hit record without all that music stuff getting in the way.

Anyway, we couldn't get a deal, but continued to hunt for gigs. They were in pretty short supply, too. We replaced Mont Campbell with the youthful Neil Murray (another member of Alan's old band Gilgamesh) [regular Terrascope readers will recognise the name from Randy California's band in Part 3 of the Spirit epic - Ed.], re-enlisted Bill as dep. drummer and for the rest of 1976 continued to rehearse and play whatever gigs we could get - about 14, according to my accounts book. But morale was low, and livings had to be earned... Alan got a job playing in a West End sex "comedy" musical called 'Let My People Come', returning home every evening a gibbering wreck after his nightly dose (pardon the expression) of bare buttocks and horrible show music. Amanda Parsons was doing a 'straight' job in Kew Gardens, while I was eking out a living writing lead sheets (ironically) for Virgin Records, immortalising in neat musical script the ravings of bands deemed more worthy of release than National Health, such as Slaughter And The Dogs.... a humbling experience, and a complete waste of ink.

By 1977 Bill had fled the fold too for the band UK, but we found a permanent drummer, Pip Pyle, who graciously accepted the post despite my initial misgivings, for which he had the good heart not to ridicule me. Much. We now dropped all Mont Campbell's material and embarked on a European tour in February, culminating in a concert at London's Victoria Palace sans Amanda Parsons, who was the next to abandon ship. Alan Gowen left shortly afterwards, fed up with all the personnel changes and general lack of progress. The band never really developed along the lines he had planned for it, which in truth was something more steeped in jazz than the kind of rock orchestra I had envisaged. Either way, this left the band in the sort of shape neither of us would have wanted originally: it had become a rock 4-piece.

This was kind of tough on me, as most of our material was written for two pairs of hands, and my one pair was already getting enough damage through pounding walls after conversations with record companies. However, around this time some good things started to happen. We met a guy called Mike Dunne who was custodian and engineer of a mobile studio called, imaginatively, 'Mobile Mobile', property of a Famous Rock Star. While the FRS battled to find musical inspiration in the Bahamas, Mike set about recording groups he liked at very reasonable rates, such as nothing. With the Mobile Mobile set up in a rehearsal room in London's Victoria, we were able to sneak in between or after paying clients' sessions and record our first album. Thanks to Mike, and aided by the return of the prodigal Alan Gowen and Amanda Parsons (who gladly returned as temporary recording guests) we finally got to make our first LP in March 1977.

No-one wanted to put it out, of course, but at least we had a tape. Then another good thing happened. We were invited to play at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, as part of a series of concerts called "Really Cultural Rock Music played by Serious Men with Beards" (or something). I was impressed, and excited to get the opportunity to play at what I considered to be a prestigious venue. Eager to justify the gig as high art, and fill in some of the gaps in our sound left by Alan's departure, I set about scoring some of our pieces for a woodwind quintet. We also invited Richard Sinclair to sing with us, and began a week's rehearsals. All for this one gig.

Subsequent events served to underline just how shittily Britain can treat its musicians, even (or specially) the really cultural serious bearded ones. My first problem was getting someone to tell us what time we were supposed to play at the QEH. At rock gigs, it doesn't matter - you just go on when everyone's drunk enough, but at a concert like this, with the audience ushered in with little gongs five minutes before the concert begins and ten musicians preparing to go on and off stage in a cultural fashion, a starting time is essential. We called the agency who'd booked us. They said they would write the playing time into the contract. The contract arrived two days before the gig - and no playing time. We rang the agency. They said they would call us back. They didn't.

I arrived at the QEH having guessed what time we would go on from a poster I saw in a railway station. When I got there I found that our lighting engineer was being refused access to the lights, and that no-one had our lighting plan (which we had sent in two weeks previously) Having been assured that we would have the full co-operation of the QEH by the agency, this made me pretty angry. Finally, after our soundcheck, a guy from the agency approached me and told me we were due on at 7:30. It was then 7:10; I'd sent the woodwind players away for some food, assuring them that we wouldn't be on until 8. The guy from the agency had been sitting in the hall all afternoon (unknown to me) while we soundchecked, and only now did he reveal our playing time. What was it, classified information?

We stalled until 7:45, but finally had to go on. When I went on stage, the woodwind players still hadn't returned from their meal, and I had no way of knowing if they would make it back in time for their first number. But THE SHOW MUST GO ON! (Why? How?)

We started the set. When it came to the time for the woodwind stuff, I said to the audience, "Ladies and gentlemen. For the next tune we are supposed to be joined by 5 woodwind players. Due to the incompetence of the agency that booked us, they left the building some time ago and I don't know if they've come back. But let's see what happens..."

Bless their hearts, they all walked on stage dead on cue, having come back early from their meal. Not one of them was still eating.

It might seem like a little thing to you, but if the woodwinders hadn't showed up I think I might easily have soiled my trousers in front of 1,000 concertgoers. Anyway, this particular clothing disaster averted, the rest of the gig went very well. At the end, the crowd demanded an encore, whistling and stamping their feet. But having gone on "late", we had "over-run" by 15 minutes. Horror! Outrage! The QEH staff said we could not do an encore. They turned all the lights out on stage, but we went on anyway. Fuck them. I groped my way to the front of the stage and found a microphone. 'Please turn the lights on' I shouted. Nothing happened. So, with the audience screaming and cheering, we began to play our encore in total darkness, with our road manager shining a torch on flautist Jimmy Hastings' music so he could negotiate his way through Phil Millers' 'Underdub' - hard enough to play even in broad daylight. After two minutes, the lights came back on to a great roar from the crowd... but the psychological damage had been done.

Important concert? Prestigious venue? BOLLOCKS. I've played some shit venues in my time, including the Zoom Club in Frankfurt where there are no doors on the toilets to discourage Heroin users from shooting up; the Mobileritz in Antwerp, frequented mainly by transvesites who ignore the band but cheer the blue slide show afterwards; I've played at really dodgy pubs and clubs in London and once in France in a disused abbatoir - but NOWHERE have I ever been this badly treated. But worse was to come. No doubt feeling that we had not yet been sufficiently humiliated, the agency witheld our fee because of "offensive" (ie truthful) remarks I had made on stage, and to cover the "extra fees" due to the QEH because of our late start. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!

We repeated the experiment of augmenting the quartet with five woodwinds and a guest vocalist at the Roundhouse in London later that year, but this time no-one went out of their way to sabotage the gig. And we got some more good news. Joop Visser of Charly Records heard our tape and LIKED it! He even listened to it all the way through without making any 'phone calls. We did a deal for the LP to be released on Charly's Affinity label, and with our advance paid Mike Dunne back just in time - the Famous Rock Star had returned from his holidays and wanted his studio bills settled. The LP, entitled 'National Health' (a cunning pun on our name) came out in early 1978.

Of course, this was all a bit too good to be true, so almost immediately Neil Murray left the group. After all, no-one had left for a while, and Neil didn't want this bi-annual tradition to fall into dis-use... Also, he had been offered a gig with Whitesnake, a rock band who went on to become enormously popular (much to our surprise) Luckily, we were able to replace him speedily with John Greaves, an old mate from the good old days at Virgin Records when Henry Cow and Hatfield & The North were on the label; before the terrible Night Of The Accountants (Wankernacht) when smart young men in suits ran amok through Virgin's roster, smashing and burning anything tainted with the forbidden word MUSIC.

John, having spent a portion of his youth playing bass in his dad's show band, could read music. Oh joy, Oh bliss. He actually sight-read parts of 'Tenemos Roads' while listening to a cassette of the tune, which pleased me no end. After a few gigs in Belgium which acclimatized him musically and socially (we got through around 8,000 bottles of wine) we set off on our most intensive touring period ever.

First we toured France for the whole of March, which was great. By now we had reverted to the old Hatfield democratic style of everyone contributing compositions, so we played 'Dreams Wide Awake' by Phil Miller, 'Twins & Trios' by John Greaves, and Pip's song about TV boredom 'A Legend In His Own Lunchtime', later retitled 'Binoculars' to avoid some obscure copyright problem. We were still playing 'Tenemos Roads' and 'Borogoves', and had recently mastered 'The Collapso', which we played with great verve, huge volume and occasional accuracy.

A certain theatricality began to creep into our stage presentation during this tour, perhaps because of the prolonged exposure to excitable Gallic audiences. Normally slightly shy of microphones, I found myself increasingly eager to address the crowd in my appalling French, turning short anouncements into long, crazed anecdotes that nobody understood. We introduced a spot in the show called 'The Unconventional Musician Of The Year Competition', in which Pip, John and myself would vie with each other to play our instruments in the most ludicrous manner. Phil was exempted because his basic playing style was so eccentric anyway. Pip would pour bags of marbles over his cymbals; John would attempt to eat his bass guitar; I would climb up on top of my Hammond organ and walk around all over my keyboards. I went off this competition a bit when John got a touch over-exuberant one night during his zany contribution and smashed my plug board with his bass.

We arranged to play the support slot on Steve Hillage's spring tour of the UK (April/May 1978). This turned out to be a financial disaster for us; we had to pay to get on the tour, but convinced Charly Records to advance us the money, reckoning the exposure would help sales of our album. The reverse was true. The album was selling pretty well until we started the tour, but as soon as we did the first date, sales miraculously stopped dead. Although the tour had its dreary aspects (majority of audience in the bar when we came on; psychotic bouncers at great venues like Portsmouth Top Rank Suite determined to give us a hard time; only being allowed to use some of the lights because we weren't the top band...) it had the advantage of enabling us to sharpen up our material, and as soon as the tour was over we began plans to record our second album. The Mobile Mobile was now immobilized at Ridge Farm Studios, then a rehearsal room, and after a few glib promises of payment to Mike Dunne we slipped in and began recording 'Of Queues and Cures'.

Not all the material on this album was rehearsed: 'Squarer for Maud' was more or less written in the studio, a process which made me uneasy at the time but which were totally vindicated by the magnificent final result. Most of the other tunes were laid down pretty quickly - I think we did 'The Collapso' in one or two takes, with no stops. As Ridge Farm was situated in a beautiful rural area in Surrey and it was a hot summer, we did a fair bit of recording outside in the open air. Most of Georgie Born's cello overdubs were recorded on the lawn outside the studio - if you solo her track on the master tape you can hear 'planes flying overhead.

As it says on the liner notes of 'Of Queues', we were so pleased by Georgie's contribution to the album that we asked her to join the band, along with her ex-Henry Cow colleague Lindsay Cooper, who played woodwinds and sax. I was very pleased with the second album, which had the great advantage (unlike the first) of being recorded when the material was fairly fresh, yet well rehearsed - a hard combination to achieve. However, paradoxically enough it was at this time that I began to lose my faith with the band, and before long I was to leave.

Towards the end of 1978 we did some very promising rehearsals with Georgie and Lindsay, supposedly to prepare for a tour of France and Italy. Some of the stuff we did was great, including part of a Lindsay Cooper piece called 'Half The Sky' (originally recorded by the Art Bears) which I loved. But, as I saw it, an element of musical anarchy began to creep in, which I perceived as destructive. The band were really keen to play at least some 'free' music, which I've never liked - it all sounds the same to me, and in my opinion is more riddled with cliches than any other, more strictly organised forms. Then there was the strong feeling that everyone should write something for the band, and the band should play it as a matter of principle. I alone wanted the right of censorship or refusal, having a strong idea of what I felt National Health should sound like. Rightly or wrongly, I considered it was my band, and I wanted a lot of control over the noise it made.

The final straw was none of these potentially solvable musical problems, but an argument about organisation. A couple of weeks before the tour was due to begin, I heard from the agent that half the dates had fallen through. This was nothing new, and the dates were probably imaginary anyway, but the financial effects were disastrous. It meant that we could only afford to take one roadie, who would have to double as sound man, and no lighting equipment. Pissed off at the agent and the world in general for making it so bloody difficult to keep this band going, I voted to call off the remaining dates and find ourselves another agent. Here again I found myself in a minority of one. The others wanted to go.

When you're really in love with a band and its music, you will go anywhere and do anything for the chance to play. In Egg I used to sometimes travel to gigs lying across my organ pedals in the back of the van - we once drove 400 miles to play a gig for £25 in a venue called The Dead End Club (attractive name, huh?) Earlier in the Health's career, we would quite happily go for two or three days without sleep to get to a European gig without incurring hotel bills. But for me, the affair was over. I quit. I just didn't think it would ever get any better.

There were some angry words wafted in my general direction which I returned with interest, but nothing of any lasting significance. The worst thing was that Georgie and Lindsay had done about a month's work for nothing, and we never got to show off the fruits of those rehearsals. Oh well... I guess finally it was OK for me to leave my own band, because, after all, everybody else had!

I did one last gig with the Health in January 1979 on 'The Old Grey Whistle Test' for BBC TV. The show had been booked for months and it would have looked bad if I had not done it. We did an extremely approximate version of 'The Collapso', during the introduction of which John finally clinched the Unconventional Musician All- Comers Cup by hurling a box of cutlery across the stage. Pip and I were too stunned to put up a challenge. 'Of Queues and Cures' was released in January by Charly Records, and the band set out to find a replacement for me. This proved fairly easy - Alan Gowen was ready to get involved again, and by February the new quartet (sans Lindsay and Georgie) had a new set rehearsed and was ready to tour Europe and Scandinavia once again. Quick work.

Talking to the roadies about this tour when they came back a month later, I was kind of glad to have missed it. Apparently they drove from Helsinki to Barcelona (a drive no sane mind would even contemplate) just to do one gig; were treated like scum in Scandinavia, misbooked into discos and had equipment stolen from a dingy club in Paris. Sounds like loads of fun. I, meanwhile, was penniless and back at the hated lead sheets (Virgin were now releasing a lot of reggae albums, impossible to write out) but somehow sensed that I had done the right thing in leaving.

As it turned out, the Health's days were numbered, but there was one last mountain to climb... AMERICA. The band had never made it to the USA, but had a strong cult following over there bordering on the maniacal. I only became fully aware of the depths of these lunatics' devotion when I went there in summer 1979 with Bill Bruford. At every show, people would scream out 'Tenemos Roads' and 'Paracelsus', as if expecting us to drop our set and suddenly launch into a 4 year old Mont Campbell composition. One guy came up to me after a gig and said, "uh... is it true that Pip Pyle is, uh... entirely made of metal?" Jesus. I assured him that this was in fact absolutely true, Pip was made of zinc alloy due to a childhood accident at a steelworks. He went away looking satisfied.

Given the almost mythological status of the band, it was relatively easy for me to cobble together half a dozen contacts who could work on fixing up a small US tour for them. To my delight, this became reality towards the end of the year. Although Pip had to practically sell his children into slavery to raise the money for the fares, and, as usual, half the dates fell through at the last moment, I was proud to see them go off in November 1979 to "go down a storm in the States", as we used to say. Give them hell, lads.

It would seem that no quarter was asked, and none given in the Health's last lunge at the big time. Readers of tender sensibilities will thank me for not revealing the full details of the merry-making, but I understand that the man of zinc and his three trusty cohorts managed to severely deplete the country's alcohol reserves and play a lot of good music into the bargain. Towards the end of the tour, a little short of material, they were encoring with a berserk version of the Rolling Stones' "Walk The Dog". I wish I'd been there - I like that tune.

It remained to see out the decade, and do one more tour of Scandinavia in May 1980, though why they would want to go back there beats me. Afterwards, that was it: Alan had had enough, for good this time, and in March he split, closely followed by the rest of the band. Pip and John both had other musical projects by this time and Phil - the only original member who NEVER LEFT - had been in the band for five years. I hereby award him the D.S. gold medal for group loyalty - it's 1990 now, and he and Pip are still playing together (in Incahoots) What of the others? Amanda Parsons works for a television company, Mont Campbell was planning to go off around the world recording folk music last time I spoke to him, John Greaves is now based in Paris and is working on solo projects, and Neil Murray is currently on tour with Black Sabbath. I'm serious!

I wasn't looking forward to writing this bit, but in May 1981 Alan Gowen died of leukaemia. His death shook us all up, and in the weeks that followed we got the band back together to play a small gig. Ostensibly it was to raise money for the funeral, that kind of thing, but it became something more. We played some unreleased material of Alan's, pieces he'd carefully arranged and notated but never recorded. It seemed natural to go on and record an LP of this stuff, as it all sounded so good. In October 1981, with finance from John-Pierre Weiller (an old friend of Alan and his wife Celia) we recorded 'D.S. Al Coda' - a memorial to Alan and his music. We took the liberty of adding "By National Health" to attract our small but devoted band of admirers.

Written and produced by Dave Stewart, copyright
Dave Stewart 1989

Engineered by Mick Dillingham, typed up by McMuff

Anyone wishing to contact Dave Stewart is welcome to do so by writing to:

Broken Records, 18 Yeoman Way, Hainault, Ilford, Essex IG6 2RN.

Go back to Terrascope Features Index