Le Beat Group Electrique - Wreckless Eric 1988
I was going to give up music, never play again. I convinced myself that all that me playing music had ever done was bring unhappiness to a lot of people. I had a nervous breakdown, I couldn't operate for a year. The Len Bright Combo fell apart at the end of 1986 and since then nothing had gone right. I was sober but I was losing my mind.
I wound up in the famed Colney Hatch asylum in North London, in an annexe for the severely clinically depressed, the Halliwick Hospital. Previous luminaries included Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo dog Band. I'd actually forgotten that I was once famous, so I was surprised when doctors and nurses started coming over from other parts of the hospital. They wanted to talk to me, they were fans from their college days.
I slowly came round to the idea that I might want to carry on playing.
When I left the hospital I stayed with my friend Walter Hacon, the guitar player in my old band and co-writer of Broken Doll. He was running a studio in his house with a business partner, a large and very positive American drummer from Kansas City who had decided to wipe out a long and chequered career by renaming himself Catfish Truton.
Andre Barreau came round to record. We met on the staircase, me clutching a toothbrush, him a Gibson SG.
Soon after that I moved into a one bedroomed flat in Shepherds Bush - 165B Uxbridge Road W12. It was there, much to the consternation of the neighbours that I eventually recorded Le Beat Group Electrique. I'd started writing songs again and recording demoes of them very quietly, late at night. Catfish lived round the corner. He'd escape from the domestic hell he was living in on the pretext of walking the dog, and hang out at my place. I'd play him my new songs and he'd join in, shaking a muesli packet or whatever came to hand and whacking the dusty arm of a chair with a rolled up newspaper.
Andre and Catfish were playing with a couple of creepy Canadiens who had come to London to be big in the music business. I went to see them play at a place called The Production Village. I think it was a showcase. They weren't very good but I was impressed by Andre and Catfish. Andre played bass in that group, he also played George Harrison in The Bootleg Beatles, the world's first tribute band. That was his day job.
Andre and I hit it off immediately – he was the only person in the world apart from me who knew Just Like Him, the B side of Somewhere by PJ Proby. We arranged to record a track together – a Titanic sized version of The Sun Is Pouring Down with Catfish on the drums. We recorded the guitar and drums in a church hall on my four track Teac – not a portastudio, this was a 1/4” open reel machine Teac 3440 that I bought with a PRS cheque back in 1979 when I was on Stiff Records.
We started doing gigs together – a guitar, bass and drums trio with me in the middle and the drums to one side We played at the Zap Club in Brighton and Moles in Bath.
I wrote more songs, made more demo recordings in my flat and passed cassettes of them to Andre. We stumbled across an acoustic scene and soon we were playing at the Troubadour in Earls Court, a folk club with a very strict acoustic policy. They didn't even have a PA system.
We played at another club in South London called God's Little Joke – this place had a small PA, microphones for the vocals and a couple you could stick in front of acoustic guitars. We'd go to the open mic nights. There were no amplifiers involved, just a couple of acoustic guitars, and for a drumkit we used a cardboard box with a tambourine inside it, propped up on a combined record player stand and LP rack made of wire. It had a peculier resonance.
We rehearsed in my flat – Andre played a Hofner Violin bass liberated from the Bootleg Beatles lock-up and Catfish played the cardboard box with the tambourine inside, augmented with a pair of maracas, a woodblock and a very old and warm sounding Zildjian crash ride cymbal. We plugged the bass into the microphone input on the Teac tape recorder and put that through my hi-fi amplifier. I played the guitar through a 15 watt Park amplifier. We only did it like this to be quiet, to avoid upsetting the neighbours. We ran through a new song called Sweet Big Thing and it sounded good so we decided to record it.
I had a Wem Audiomaster – a five channel mono mixer, one of the first PA mixing desks ever built. I'm sure it was ever intended for recording but we were nearing the end of the eighties and I was sick and tired of the correct way of doing things. The desk had two outputs – main and monitor, so it took a bit of juggling. I put a Shure SM57 microphone inside the opening of the cardboard box, a cheap Sony tape recorder microphone over the cymbal, a Shure SM58 in front of the guitar amp and balanced and mixed them through the Audiomaster down to one track on the four track. The bass went on a track on its own track. I did the vocal afterwards on a separate track and Andre played a xylophone while I played a second guitar on the final track.
The result was very pleasing, stripped back and to the point, different to anything else that was around at the time. We decided to record everything like this, forget the full drumkit and the big amplifiers, we had a new direction – an electric skiffle beat music hybrid. The term “lo-fi” wasn't in common use yet - I think we stumbled across it before it was invented.
I'd always wanted to make homemade records. I'd always wanted to make a record on my four track Teac though I kept quiet about it because people who obviously knew better than I did, large, opinionated eighties people, told me it wasn't possible.
I'd survived alcoholism, severe depression and a mental hospital, so as far as I was concerned anything was possible.
We recorded the entire record in my living room.
On all the other tracks apart from Sweet Big Thing the vocals are recorded live. I'd never done this before, I'd always agonised about my vocals and recorded take after take. It never seem to make any difference, and quite often the vocals sounded as though they'd come unhinged from the rest of the track. This was different, we played and I sang at the same time. We played quietly and there was no separation between the instruments. We didn't even use headphones. Andre quite often leaned in and sang backing vocals into my microphone.
We drank a lot of tea. I had a Brown Derby teapot with an old knitted tea cosy from a charity shop, and three floral patterned cups and saucers from the Shepherds Bush Market. Between takes we made tea and bought it in from the kitchen on a tray, complete with tea strainer and milk in a jug, and someone would be detailed to pop down to Michael K Veg Fruit across the road for chocolate digestives and another packet of tea. I'm sure if you listen carefully you can hear the clatter of tea cups being placed on saucers at the beginnings of the tracks.
You might also hear the odd London bus – there was a bus stop outside the window. Sometimes the frequencies created by the buses revving up would cause the glass in the window to vibrate. That's probably on there somewhere too. And if you play the record backwards somewhere between Parallel Beds and True Happiness you'll hear the voice of Will Hay because that was what was on the TV while we were recording the speaking clock, a dripping tap, a horrible thing that gave out an obscene metalic laugh when you turned it upside down, and whatever else we could find in my flat including the TV.
Every track was a happening. Because we were singing and playing together in one room all at the same time, and without headphones, the songs came to immediate life. We'd record three or four songs a day, two or three versions and keep the best one. Suddenly we were making an album, it sort of unfolded in front of us.
The bass went onto track one, the drumkit (such as it was) and guitar on track two, the vocals on track free and that left one track for all the overdubs. I played a Vox Continental organ on a lot of tracks while Andre played percussion of one sort or another, and sometimes we'd sing harmonies together. I'd play the organ with one hand, shake a maraca with the other, we'd sing a backing vocal and Andre would loom into the microphone with an unexpected burst of acoustic guitar or handclapping. All this would go down on one track via the trusty Audiomaster, as balanced or unbalanced as it happened to be.
The record pretty well mixed itself, there wasn't much to be done. I borrowed a Revox A77, the same one we used to mix the first Len Bright Combo album and mixed it down on that. I used a Great British Spring Reverb, a weird contraption encased in a drainpipe, and gave everything except the bass a touch of reverberation. I wired that up to the headphone output on the Teac four track, I'm sure I mis-matched the impedances magnificently! The finished record was mono – there wasn't much choice because the Audiomaster only had one output. Nick Lowe had told me a few months before – you want your whole group to sound like one big acoustic guitar. I don't think the result was what he had in mind but I liked that idea and tried to keep it in mind.
Le Beat Group Electrique is my most homemade album and I think it sounds the better for it - up-close, eccentric and deeply personal. People told me I didn't know what I was doing, that I should put myself in the hands of professionals but I'm glad I didn't. I'd made that mistake before.
I moved to France as soon as the album was finished. I didn't have much choice – I was evicted from the flat much to the joy of my neighbours, a family of indeterminate size underneath, and a large man who beat his wife up overhead. I had a French girlfriend. She lived in Paris and owned a delapidated farmhouse out in the country seventy miles west of Paris, near Chartres. I moved in there with two guitars, a fifteen watt amp, a suitcase of clothes and a Penguin phrasebook.
I managed to get a deal with the Paris label, New Rose. They had Alex Chilton and Tav Falco's Panther Burns and they were thrilled to add a star of Stiff Records to the roster. I walked in off the street, they gave me a contract, we agreed an advance and terms, I signed the contract and walked out with a cheque. They hadn't heard the album but they were sure it was going to be good. They didn't really seem that interested in hearing it. I don't think the people who ran New Rose liked music, they should have been stamp collectors.
I bought the Peugeot 404 that graces the cover of the original album and we went on tour in it. One fifteen watt guitar amp, one Vox AC30 with reinforced speakers for the bass, one electric guitar, one bass guitar, a stout cardboard box and one Zildjian crash ride cymbal. Sound engineers of the eighties still tremble at the mention of it – they didn't know how to mix us, they'd never heard a cardboard box before, and when we asked for one overhead microphone over the entire group they were deeply confused. The German booking agency that New Rose foisted on us were furious because all their groups used a drum riser, it was standard procedure.
I think New Rose were dismayed when they heard the album though they really shouldn't have been. Andre Barreau once described it as pain disguised as pop. It was catchy, it was deep, it was soulful and in a couple of places downright silly. A strange amalgamation of electricity and skiffle. They told me the guitar was too loud and you couldn't hear the drums.
I tried to explain: 'That's because you keep listening to records where the drums are too loud and the guitars are mixed back behind the synthesisers.'
They didn't get it, said the quality wan't good enough and played me a Simple Minds record to illustrate their point. The large, cigar-sucking boss of New Rose, Patrick Mathe, told me that I'd never have any success until I made a proper record in a real studio with a real engineer and a real producer, and until then I'd never be happy.
It's a long hard road to True Happiness. I'm about as happy as a man can be, even more so now that the world appears to be catching up with me and this album's coming out again. And I'm very glad I never gave it all up.
I hope you can find a place for it.
I wound up in the famed Colney Hatch asylum in North London, in an annexe for the severely clinically depressed, the Halliwick Hospital. Previous luminaries included Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo dog Band. I'd actually forgotten that I was once famous, so I was surprised when doctors and nurses started coming over from other parts of the hospital. They wanted to talk to me, they were fans from their college days.
I slowly came round to the idea that I might want to carry on playing.
When I left the hospital I stayed with my friend Walter Hacon, the guitar player in my old band and co-writer of Broken Doll. He was running a studio in his house with a business partner, a large and very positive American drummer from Kansas City who had decided to wipe out a long and chequered career by renaming himself Catfish Truton.
Andre Barreau came round to record. We met on the staircase, me clutching a toothbrush, him a Gibson SG.
Soon after that I moved into a one bedroomed flat in Shepherds Bush - 165B Uxbridge Road W12. It was there, much to the consternation of the neighbours that I eventually recorded Le Beat Group Electrique. I'd started writing songs again and recording demoes of them very quietly, late at night. Catfish lived round the corner. He'd escape from the domestic hell he was living in on the pretext of walking the dog, and hang out at my place. I'd play him my new songs and he'd join in, shaking a muesli packet or whatever came to hand and whacking the dusty arm of a chair with a rolled up newspaper.
Andre and Catfish were playing with a couple of creepy Canadiens who had come to London to be big in the music business. I went to see them play at a place called The Production Village. I think it was a showcase. They weren't very good but I was impressed by Andre and Catfish. Andre played bass in that group, he also played George Harrison in The Bootleg Beatles, the world's first tribute band. That was his day job.
Andre and I hit it off immediately – he was the only person in the world apart from me who knew Just Like Him, the B side of Somewhere by PJ Proby. We arranged to record a track together – a Titanic sized version of The Sun Is Pouring Down with Catfish on the drums. We recorded the guitar and drums in a church hall on my four track Teac – not a portastudio, this was a 1/4” open reel machine Teac 3440 that I bought with a PRS cheque back in 1979 when I was on Stiff Records.
We started doing gigs together – a guitar, bass and drums trio with me in the middle and the drums to one side We played at the Zap Club in Brighton and Moles in Bath.
I wrote more songs, made more demo recordings in my flat and passed cassettes of them to Andre. We stumbled across an acoustic scene and soon we were playing at the Troubadour in Earls Court, a folk club with a very strict acoustic policy. They didn't even have a PA system.
We played at another club in South London called God's Little Joke – this place had a small PA, microphones for the vocals and a couple you could stick in front of acoustic guitars. We'd go to the open mic nights. There were no amplifiers involved, just a couple of acoustic guitars, and for a drumkit we used a cardboard box with a tambourine inside it, propped up on a combined record player stand and LP rack made of wire. It had a peculier resonance.
We rehearsed in my flat – Andre played a Hofner Violin bass liberated from the Bootleg Beatles lock-up and Catfish played the cardboard box with the tambourine inside, augmented with a pair of maracas, a woodblock and a very old and warm sounding Zildjian crash ride cymbal. We plugged the bass into the microphone input on the Teac tape recorder and put that through my hi-fi amplifier. I played the guitar through a 15 watt Park amplifier. We only did it like this to be quiet, to avoid upsetting the neighbours. We ran through a new song called Sweet Big Thing and it sounded good so we decided to record it.
I had a Wem Audiomaster – a five channel mono mixer, one of the first PA mixing desks ever built. I'm sure it was ever intended for recording but we were nearing the end of the eighties and I was sick and tired of the correct way of doing things. The desk had two outputs – main and monitor, so it took a bit of juggling. I put a Shure SM57 microphone inside the opening of the cardboard box, a cheap Sony tape recorder microphone over the cymbal, a Shure SM58 in front of the guitar amp and balanced and mixed them through the Audiomaster down to one track on the four track. The bass went on a track on its own track. I did the vocal afterwards on a separate track and Andre played a xylophone while I played a second guitar on the final track.
The result was very pleasing, stripped back and to the point, different to anything else that was around at the time. We decided to record everything like this, forget the full drumkit and the big amplifiers, we had a new direction – an electric skiffle beat music hybrid. The term “lo-fi” wasn't in common use yet - I think we stumbled across it before it was invented.
I'd always wanted to make homemade records. I'd always wanted to make a record on my four track Teac though I kept quiet about it because people who obviously knew better than I did, large, opinionated eighties people, told me it wasn't possible.
I'd survived alcoholism, severe depression and a mental hospital, so as far as I was concerned anything was possible.
We recorded the entire record in my living room.
On all the other tracks apart from Sweet Big Thing the vocals are recorded live. I'd never done this before, I'd always agonised about my vocals and recorded take after take. It never seem to make any difference, and quite often the vocals sounded as though they'd come unhinged from the rest of the track. This was different, we played and I sang at the same time. We played quietly and there was no separation between the instruments. We didn't even use headphones. Andre quite often leaned in and sang backing vocals into my microphone.
We drank a lot of tea. I had a Brown Derby teapot with an old knitted tea cosy from a charity shop, and three floral patterned cups and saucers from the Shepherds Bush Market. Between takes we made tea and bought it in from the kitchen on a tray, complete with tea strainer and milk in a jug, and someone would be detailed to pop down to Michael K Veg Fruit across the road for chocolate digestives and another packet of tea. I'm sure if you listen carefully you can hear the clatter of tea cups being placed on saucers at the beginnings of the tracks.
You might also hear the odd London bus – there was a bus stop outside the window. Sometimes the frequencies created by the buses revving up would cause the glass in the window to vibrate. That's probably on there somewhere too. And if you play the record backwards somewhere between Parallel Beds and True Happiness you'll hear the voice of Will Hay because that was what was on the TV while we were recording the speaking clock, a dripping tap, a horrible thing that gave out an obscene metalic laugh when you turned it upside down, and whatever else we could find in my flat including the TV.
Every track was a happening. Because we were singing and playing together in one room all at the same time, and without headphones, the songs came to immediate life. We'd record three or four songs a day, two or three versions and keep the best one. Suddenly we were making an album, it sort of unfolded in front of us.
The bass went onto track one, the drumkit (such as it was) and guitar on track two, the vocals on track free and that left one track for all the overdubs. I played a Vox Continental organ on a lot of tracks while Andre played percussion of one sort or another, and sometimes we'd sing harmonies together. I'd play the organ with one hand, shake a maraca with the other, we'd sing a backing vocal and Andre would loom into the microphone with an unexpected burst of acoustic guitar or handclapping. All this would go down on one track via the trusty Audiomaster, as balanced or unbalanced as it happened to be.
The record pretty well mixed itself, there wasn't much to be done. I borrowed a Revox A77, the same one we used to mix the first Len Bright Combo album and mixed it down on that. I used a Great British Spring Reverb, a weird contraption encased in a drainpipe, and gave everything except the bass a touch of reverberation. I wired that up to the headphone output on the Teac four track, I'm sure I mis-matched the impedances magnificently! The finished record was mono – there wasn't much choice because the Audiomaster only had one output. Nick Lowe had told me a few months before – you want your whole group to sound like one big acoustic guitar. I don't think the result was what he had in mind but I liked that idea and tried to keep it in mind.
Le Beat Group Electrique is my most homemade album and I think it sounds the better for it - up-close, eccentric and deeply personal. People told me I didn't know what I was doing, that I should put myself in the hands of professionals but I'm glad I didn't. I'd made that mistake before.
I moved to France as soon as the album was finished. I didn't have much choice – I was evicted from the flat much to the joy of my neighbours, a family of indeterminate size underneath, and a large man who beat his wife up overhead. I had a French girlfriend. She lived in Paris and owned a delapidated farmhouse out in the country seventy miles west of Paris, near Chartres. I moved in there with two guitars, a fifteen watt amp, a suitcase of clothes and a Penguin phrasebook.
I managed to get a deal with the Paris label, New Rose. They had Alex Chilton and Tav Falco's Panther Burns and they were thrilled to add a star of Stiff Records to the roster. I walked in off the street, they gave me a contract, we agreed an advance and terms, I signed the contract and walked out with a cheque. They hadn't heard the album but they were sure it was going to be good. They didn't really seem that interested in hearing it. I don't think the people who ran New Rose liked music, they should have been stamp collectors.
I bought the Peugeot 404 that graces the cover of the original album and we went on tour in it. One fifteen watt guitar amp, one Vox AC30 with reinforced speakers for the bass, one electric guitar, one bass guitar, a stout cardboard box and one Zildjian crash ride cymbal. Sound engineers of the eighties still tremble at the mention of it – they didn't know how to mix us, they'd never heard a cardboard box before, and when we asked for one overhead microphone over the entire group they were deeply confused. The German booking agency that New Rose foisted on us were furious because all their groups used a drum riser, it was standard procedure.
I think New Rose were dismayed when they heard the album though they really shouldn't have been. Andre Barreau once described it as pain disguised as pop. It was catchy, it was deep, it was soulful and in a couple of places downright silly. A strange amalgamation of electricity and skiffle. They told me the guitar was too loud and you couldn't hear the drums.
I tried to explain: 'That's because you keep listening to records where the drums are too loud and the guitars are mixed back behind the synthesisers.'
They didn't get it, said the quality wan't good enough and played me a Simple Minds record to illustrate their point. The large, cigar-sucking boss of New Rose, Patrick Mathe, told me that I'd never have any success until I made a proper record in a real studio with a real engineer and a real producer, and until then I'd never be happy.
It's a long hard road to True Happiness. I'm about as happy as a man can be, even more so now that the world appears to be catching up with me and this album's coming out again. And I'm very glad I never gave it all up.
I hope you can find a place for it.
