The Donovan Of Trash - Wreckless Eric 1993
It took a very long time to record The Donovan Of Trash.
When I started I lived in an old farmhouse on the edge of a village in rural France. There were 149 inhabitants. The village mayor saw to it that I got a Carte de Sejour, made me an official French resident, so now they had 150 inhabitants and were eligible for more money from the state, money they probably used to fill potholes and hire an accordionist for the annual soiree choucroute.
The Front National, the extreme right wing party lead by Jean Marie Le Pen, was gaining popularity in the area. Foreigners were bad news. So every time anything went wrong or something went missing they came to me. I was accused of stealing a farmer's pick-axe from the corner of a field; a neighbour's dog came home limping – obviously I'd kicked it; a cat was hit by a car outside my house so it was decided that I'd held it down whilst driving over it repeatedly with my van...
Angry men would appear, growling and shaking the metal fence around the property. I kept the gate locked.
I was the anti-Christ. Officially resident, useful, but not entirely welcome.
There was nowhere to go, and definitely nowhere to play. Bars were all closed by eight thirty at at night, even at the weekends. And in any case I didn't drink. So apart from driving to other countries to do gigs, or to the local market to buy food, I never went out.
Winter was especially challenging – as the night came down a streetlight came on at the edge of the property by the road. A cold, blueish-white gleam made an illuminated shape for the rain to sparkle through. At 10pm that disappeared and I was surrounded by blackness, alone at the edge of the village with the muddy fields beyond.
I wrote a lot of songs.
Eventually I started to record them. The house was actually two small houses joined together by a large barn. I lived in the bigger one which had a kitchen, a bathroom, two big rooms and a woodburner. The house on the other side was just two rooms with marble floors, no sanitation and no heating. I had my recording equipment set up in there – the same stuff I'd used to record Le Beat Group Electrique – the five channel WEM Audiomaster PA mixing desk, my trusty Teac 3440 four track tape recorder and a couple of old Ferrograph two track machines that I'd found in junk shops. I didn't do much recording in the winter because it was too cold and I couldn't deal with trudging through the darkness of a dripping orchard to get to the damp and freezing studio at the other end of the building.
So I just wrote songs – Joe Meek, Paris In June, The Consolation Prize, Semi-Porno Statuette, School, Haunted House...
I recorded If It Makes You Happy with a Mexican bass player, Eduardo Leal de la Gala, and Fabrice Bertran, a percussionist from Rouen. They were my band for a while. To be honest they weren't very good – I'm sure they won't mind me saying that as it was fairly evident - but we managed to capture something with If It Makes You Happy. Fabrice had an ex-Salvation Army marching band bass drum with a pair of bongos perched on top, and a huge Zildjian crash ride cymbal which must have been twenty four inches across. We recorded the drums, double bass and acoustic guitar together, along with a vocal and electric harmonica. I used the same ten hole Hohner Blues Harp in the key of B for everything that required a harmonica. The harmonica was mounted on a frame with an ancient Grundig tape recorder microphone gaffa-taped to the front of it. The microphone was plugged into a Watkins Copicat and then into a small amplifier turned up to the point of feedback.
I overdubbed the electric guitar on the same track as some extra percussion, using a 1950s Selmer amplifier with the tremelo turned full up. It was a vicious recording of a vicious song.
Fabrice left the bass drum behind so I braved the cold for long enough to record Haunted House using the bass drum and the big cymbal played with a beater for the percussion. It was the first time I played all the instruments on a record myself - acoustic guitar, bass guitar, electric guitar (plugged straight into the WEM Audiomaster with the reverb turned up), and the electric harmonica. I was still on the New Rose label at the time and for some reason, I’m not sure why, they put it out as a forty five. I wanted it to sound like the early Moody Blues but I don't think it does.
As the spring came around I recorded Semi-Porno Statuette which involved a packing case played with a bass drum beater, a gas cannister hit with a pair of pliers, and a ridiculous process involving two or three sped-up guitars recorded with a lump of tape on the capstan pole of the four track to make it wobble. Over a year later I had my girlfriend record a pre-ordained series of notes on a Hammond organ through a fuzz box, with strict instructions on when to switch the vibrato on and off, while I played a bass guitar on the same track. It took all afternoon to get right.
But that was much later.
Back at the farmhouse spring had come around and my friend Bruce Brand from The Len Bright Combo came to visit. He bought his girlfriend with him, Holly Golightly, and she sat around looking bored while we recorded Paris In June and School. No one was aware at the time of Holly's musical talents. Bruce played the drums while I sang and strummed an acoustic guitar, then he played bass while I played my newly acquired Hammond L100 organ. The Hammond was a battered old thing, it featured on a lot of tracks on The Donovan Of Trash.
Later on I overdubbed an electric guitar and harmonica on Paris in June, and on School added a kazoo and comb and tissue paper choir made up of my girlfriend and some visiting Germans. That took all afternoon as well because they wouldn't stop laughing.
By the spring of 1991 I had five tracks in various states of progress and preparation - Semi-Porno Stauette, School, Haunted House, If It Makes You Happy and Paris In June. With no record company breathing down my neck and no regular band to push me along I was drifting. I didn't dare play the tracks to anyone because even I was aware that there was something more than a little disolute about them. I had an idea most people wouldn't even entertain them as demoes, and I was beginning to wonder if they had any merit whatsoever.
I moved house. Ten miles up the road to a village called Laons, a buzzing metropolis with a population of nearly five hundred. I took up residence in the former village dance hall, 1 rue du Cormier. The building had been converted into a holiday home by a lunatic using pallet wood, hardboard and interlocking blocks made from some sort of plaster. In winter it was a hell-hole – no heating, no insolation, no hot water, dangerous wiring. Bit it was very cheap and quite charming. I installed a couple of woodburners, bought a gas heater and lived there on a temporary basis for the next seven years.
I installed the recording equipment in an eight foot by twelve foot room with the window blocked up. Andre Barreau and Catfish Truton came over from England on the car ferry and we recorded more tracks – Joe Meek, Birthday Blues, The Consolation Prize and The Nerd/Turkey Song. Catfish said he wanted to be credited on the album so badly, even if it was just for breathing. Later on after dinner the chair he was sitting on collapsed under him. A few weeks later the was hospitalised with pneumonia instead so that's what he got credited with – broken chair, drums, pneumonia, breathing etc.
Andre came back and helped finish off a few things. He played the solo on Joe Meek on a Hofner bass guitar through an AKG echo plate I'd bought from a BBC equipment sale. and he played the lead guitar on The Consolation Prize.
We invented Simon D'Ogmess, celebrated compere and personality: (that's D'Ogmess with a silent G as in Domestos, but without the toss...) and recorded The Extra Bonus Track. The CD (that's compact disc) was taking over. Vinyl was apparently a thing of the past. We didn't pretend to understand this but we did our best to embrace the idea, albeit by taking the piss. Of course The Extra Bonus Track ended up on the vinyl too.
Because I now had the Hammond organ I really wanted to record another version of Lureland from the first Len Bright Combo album. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the original, I just wanted to hear it with a Hammond – I'd used a Vox Continental on the Combo version.
My friend Martin Stone who lived in Paris had a band called Almost Presley. They came over and recorded Harry's Flat (a stain by stain account of life in the Bauhaus). My German girlfriend rented Harry's flat in Kassel while Harry was doing Voluntary Service in Botswana or somewhere. I never met Harry but I felt I knew him from the austere décor and the height of the sink in the bathroom. We didn't mean to, but while he was away we practically wrecked the place, mishap by mishap.
Almost Presley gave Harry's Flat a jaunty Parisian swing. I recorded the entire track live, vocals included, six of us crammed into my tiny studio with all the equipment. I don't think I could do a better job now.
Martin stayed behind to play fuzz guitar on The Nerd/Turkey Song while I played the Hammond and we attempted backing vocals, all at the same time on the same track. It was moments like that that gave the album its sketchy quality. The walls close in and reality turns to custard...
Four track recording was tricky. I would record on all four tracks and mix them down to one track on one of my 1/4” Ferrograph machines. I'd take the tape off the Ferrograph and put it on the Teac four track. The mixed-down track would come up on tracks one and two and I'd keep whichever came up the strongest and carry on recording on the other three tracks. This did weird things to the pitching, and instruments would almost disappear at times, submerged amongst strangely oscillating keyboards and atonal guitars.
I wrote Duvet Fever in the Medway Towns back in the mid-eighties. It was rejected by The Len Bright Combo for being too miserable and for having a pompous riff. I played all the instruments myself, starting with an acoustic guitar. The bank manager in the fitted wardrobe came from an eighties TV advert – the guy can't sleep for worrying about his precarious finances, but the bank manager materialises from the wardrobe with a solution – basically a further overdraft and a guarantee of penury and probable bancruptcy - shadowy grey bedroom walls stand to attention through the night, a hundred silent addition machine are working overtime, night-searching index files, bedtime through til dawn, checking names in the main accounting hall... When I wrote it we were deep in the Thatcher era - no one I knew even had a job, let alone enough money to live on. It was 1984 and Big Brother was becoming a reality long before it became an inane TV show.
Suddenly I had an album, or possibly just an album's worth of material. I didn't know what to do with it so it sat around for a year while I toured Europe with an American band, feeling inferior, inadequate and increasingly isolated.
Somehow, at the beginning of 1993, I managed to pull it all together. I locked myself away in my shabby old dance hall, and with great trepidation, anguishing for fear of what people might think, I mixed all the tracks into glorious mono and put them in an order that appeared to make sense. It took me a week. Some days I thought it sounded brilliant. On other days I was ashamed.
I still feel a bit like that about this record.
Billy Childish, who I knew from the Medway Towns and from being in The Len Bright Combo, offered to put it out on his Hangman label. I got another offer from the US label Sympathy For The Record Industry who ended up releasing it on CD.
I cobbled together the artwork using a press photo from the tour with the American group. I'd needed a press photo before they came over so I'd got a couple of friends to do it and explained in the press release that the musicians were so famous, and so tied up in contractual obligations, that they could only be photographed with a bucket and a cooking pot covering their heads. I'd stood in a hole in the ground to make them look bigger so that they'd somehow look more American. My Dutch agent was furious, he said the photo was and an insult to the musicans and was tantramount to racism. I never got why.
I'd found some saucy French magazines under the linoleum in what had once been a teenage boy's bedroom. I cut out some naked, airbrushed ladies and stuck them on the back cover. I thought they were at once elegant, classical, and trashy.
Then the album came out and took an awfully long time to sell not a lot of copies.
I thought about giving up, doing something else, though I can't imagine what. But occasionally I'd get some encouragement – Spex Magazine in Germany carried an article about it, a rave review entitled A Journey Into Sound. Years later I met Greg Cartwright from The Reigning Sound. He told me The Donovan Of Trash was one of his favourite albums of all time. He asked me if I'd like to produce an album for them. But by that time he'd had a few drinks and we were in the car park after the show. It never happened which is probably just as well, if only for my precarious sanity.
Right now I think The Donovan Of Trash sounds pretty good so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.
Teac 3440 four track open reel tape machine, WEM Audiomaster five channel mixer, Shure SM57, Shure SM58, Reslo Ribbon Mic, Watkins Copicat, Vortexion Ferrograph 1/4” two track, Hammond L100, Apollo CL36 compressors (levered from a defunct BBC console), Hofner Senator bass, Hofner Club 60 guitar, Guld D90 acoustic, Ferrograph ribbon mic, Epiphone Coronet guitar, Microfret Spacetone guitar, Jennings Univox, cardboard box with tambourine inside, packing case, gas cannister, pliers, Eko bass guitar, 12 watt Watkins Scout amplifier, 15 watt Selmer Stadium amplifier, AKG BX15 reverb unit, Salvation Army bass drum, approximately one thousand miles of quarter inch Ampex 456 recording tape.
When I started I lived in an old farmhouse on the edge of a village in rural France. There were 149 inhabitants. The village mayor saw to it that I got a Carte de Sejour, made me an official French resident, so now they had 150 inhabitants and were eligible for more money from the state, money they probably used to fill potholes and hire an accordionist for the annual soiree choucroute.
The Front National, the extreme right wing party lead by Jean Marie Le Pen, was gaining popularity in the area. Foreigners were bad news. So every time anything went wrong or something went missing they came to me. I was accused of stealing a farmer's pick-axe from the corner of a field; a neighbour's dog came home limping – obviously I'd kicked it; a cat was hit by a car outside my house so it was decided that I'd held it down whilst driving over it repeatedly with my van...
Angry men would appear, growling and shaking the metal fence around the property. I kept the gate locked.
I was the anti-Christ. Officially resident, useful, but not entirely welcome.
There was nowhere to go, and definitely nowhere to play. Bars were all closed by eight thirty at at night, even at the weekends. And in any case I didn't drink. So apart from driving to other countries to do gigs, or to the local market to buy food, I never went out.
Winter was especially challenging – as the night came down a streetlight came on at the edge of the property by the road. A cold, blueish-white gleam made an illuminated shape for the rain to sparkle through. At 10pm that disappeared and I was surrounded by blackness, alone at the edge of the village with the muddy fields beyond.
I wrote a lot of songs.
Eventually I started to record them. The house was actually two small houses joined together by a large barn. I lived in the bigger one which had a kitchen, a bathroom, two big rooms and a woodburner. The house on the other side was just two rooms with marble floors, no sanitation and no heating. I had my recording equipment set up in there – the same stuff I'd used to record Le Beat Group Electrique – the five channel WEM Audiomaster PA mixing desk, my trusty Teac 3440 four track tape recorder and a couple of old Ferrograph two track machines that I'd found in junk shops. I didn't do much recording in the winter because it was too cold and I couldn't deal with trudging through the darkness of a dripping orchard to get to the damp and freezing studio at the other end of the building.
So I just wrote songs – Joe Meek, Paris In June, The Consolation Prize, Semi-Porno Statuette, School, Haunted House...
I recorded If It Makes You Happy with a Mexican bass player, Eduardo Leal de la Gala, and Fabrice Bertran, a percussionist from Rouen. They were my band for a while. To be honest they weren't very good – I'm sure they won't mind me saying that as it was fairly evident - but we managed to capture something with If It Makes You Happy. Fabrice had an ex-Salvation Army marching band bass drum with a pair of bongos perched on top, and a huge Zildjian crash ride cymbal which must have been twenty four inches across. We recorded the drums, double bass and acoustic guitar together, along with a vocal and electric harmonica. I used the same ten hole Hohner Blues Harp in the key of B for everything that required a harmonica. The harmonica was mounted on a frame with an ancient Grundig tape recorder microphone gaffa-taped to the front of it. The microphone was plugged into a Watkins Copicat and then into a small amplifier turned up to the point of feedback.
I overdubbed the electric guitar on the same track as some extra percussion, using a 1950s Selmer amplifier with the tremelo turned full up. It was a vicious recording of a vicious song.
Fabrice left the bass drum behind so I braved the cold for long enough to record Haunted House using the bass drum and the big cymbal played with a beater for the percussion. It was the first time I played all the instruments on a record myself - acoustic guitar, bass guitar, electric guitar (plugged straight into the WEM Audiomaster with the reverb turned up), and the electric harmonica. I was still on the New Rose label at the time and for some reason, I’m not sure why, they put it out as a forty five. I wanted it to sound like the early Moody Blues but I don't think it does.
As the spring came around I recorded Semi-Porno Statuette which involved a packing case played with a bass drum beater, a gas cannister hit with a pair of pliers, and a ridiculous process involving two or three sped-up guitars recorded with a lump of tape on the capstan pole of the four track to make it wobble. Over a year later I had my girlfriend record a pre-ordained series of notes on a Hammond organ through a fuzz box, with strict instructions on when to switch the vibrato on and off, while I played a bass guitar on the same track. It took all afternoon to get right.
But that was much later.
Back at the farmhouse spring had come around and my friend Bruce Brand from The Len Bright Combo came to visit. He bought his girlfriend with him, Holly Golightly, and she sat around looking bored while we recorded Paris In June and School. No one was aware at the time of Holly's musical talents. Bruce played the drums while I sang and strummed an acoustic guitar, then he played bass while I played my newly acquired Hammond L100 organ. The Hammond was a battered old thing, it featured on a lot of tracks on The Donovan Of Trash.
Later on I overdubbed an electric guitar and harmonica on Paris in June, and on School added a kazoo and comb and tissue paper choir made up of my girlfriend and some visiting Germans. That took all afternoon as well because they wouldn't stop laughing.
By the spring of 1991 I had five tracks in various states of progress and preparation - Semi-Porno Stauette, School, Haunted House, If It Makes You Happy and Paris In June. With no record company breathing down my neck and no regular band to push me along I was drifting. I didn't dare play the tracks to anyone because even I was aware that there was something more than a little disolute about them. I had an idea most people wouldn't even entertain them as demoes, and I was beginning to wonder if they had any merit whatsoever.
I moved house. Ten miles up the road to a village called Laons, a buzzing metropolis with a population of nearly five hundred. I took up residence in the former village dance hall, 1 rue du Cormier. The building had been converted into a holiday home by a lunatic using pallet wood, hardboard and interlocking blocks made from some sort of plaster. In winter it was a hell-hole – no heating, no insolation, no hot water, dangerous wiring. Bit it was very cheap and quite charming. I installed a couple of woodburners, bought a gas heater and lived there on a temporary basis for the next seven years.
I installed the recording equipment in an eight foot by twelve foot room with the window blocked up. Andre Barreau and Catfish Truton came over from England on the car ferry and we recorded more tracks – Joe Meek, Birthday Blues, The Consolation Prize and The Nerd/Turkey Song. Catfish said he wanted to be credited on the album so badly, even if it was just for breathing. Later on after dinner the chair he was sitting on collapsed under him. A few weeks later the was hospitalised with pneumonia instead so that's what he got credited with – broken chair, drums, pneumonia, breathing etc.
Andre came back and helped finish off a few things. He played the solo on Joe Meek on a Hofner bass guitar through an AKG echo plate I'd bought from a BBC equipment sale. and he played the lead guitar on The Consolation Prize.
We invented Simon D'Ogmess, celebrated compere and personality: (that's D'Ogmess with a silent G as in Domestos, but without the toss...) and recorded The Extra Bonus Track. The CD (that's compact disc) was taking over. Vinyl was apparently a thing of the past. We didn't pretend to understand this but we did our best to embrace the idea, albeit by taking the piss. Of course The Extra Bonus Track ended up on the vinyl too.
Because I now had the Hammond organ I really wanted to record another version of Lureland from the first Len Bright Combo album. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the original, I just wanted to hear it with a Hammond – I'd used a Vox Continental on the Combo version.
My friend Martin Stone who lived in Paris had a band called Almost Presley. They came over and recorded Harry's Flat (a stain by stain account of life in the Bauhaus). My German girlfriend rented Harry's flat in Kassel while Harry was doing Voluntary Service in Botswana or somewhere. I never met Harry but I felt I knew him from the austere décor and the height of the sink in the bathroom. We didn't mean to, but while he was away we practically wrecked the place, mishap by mishap.
Almost Presley gave Harry's Flat a jaunty Parisian swing. I recorded the entire track live, vocals included, six of us crammed into my tiny studio with all the equipment. I don't think I could do a better job now.
Martin stayed behind to play fuzz guitar on The Nerd/Turkey Song while I played the Hammond and we attempted backing vocals, all at the same time on the same track. It was moments like that that gave the album its sketchy quality. The walls close in and reality turns to custard...
Four track recording was tricky. I would record on all four tracks and mix them down to one track on one of my 1/4” Ferrograph machines. I'd take the tape off the Ferrograph and put it on the Teac four track. The mixed-down track would come up on tracks one and two and I'd keep whichever came up the strongest and carry on recording on the other three tracks. This did weird things to the pitching, and instruments would almost disappear at times, submerged amongst strangely oscillating keyboards and atonal guitars.
I wrote Duvet Fever in the Medway Towns back in the mid-eighties. It was rejected by The Len Bright Combo for being too miserable and for having a pompous riff. I played all the instruments myself, starting with an acoustic guitar. The bank manager in the fitted wardrobe came from an eighties TV advert – the guy can't sleep for worrying about his precarious finances, but the bank manager materialises from the wardrobe with a solution – basically a further overdraft and a guarantee of penury and probable bancruptcy - shadowy grey bedroom walls stand to attention through the night, a hundred silent addition machine are working overtime, night-searching index files, bedtime through til dawn, checking names in the main accounting hall... When I wrote it we were deep in the Thatcher era - no one I knew even had a job, let alone enough money to live on. It was 1984 and Big Brother was becoming a reality long before it became an inane TV show.
Suddenly I had an album, or possibly just an album's worth of material. I didn't know what to do with it so it sat around for a year while I toured Europe with an American band, feeling inferior, inadequate and increasingly isolated.
Somehow, at the beginning of 1993, I managed to pull it all together. I locked myself away in my shabby old dance hall, and with great trepidation, anguishing for fear of what people might think, I mixed all the tracks into glorious mono and put them in an order that appeared to make sense. It took me a week. Some days I thought it sounded brilliant. On other days I was ashamed.
I still feel a bit like that about this record.
Billy Childish, who I knew from the Medway Towns and from being in The Len Bright Combo, offered to put it out on his Hangman label. I got another offer from the US label Sympathy For The Record Industry who ended up releasing it on CD.
I cobbled together the artwork using a press photo from the tour with the American group. I'd needed a press photo before they came over so I'd got a couple of friends to do it and explained in the press release that the musicians were so famous, and so tied up in contractual obligations, that they could only be photographed with a bucket and a cooking pot covering their heads. I'd stood in a hole in the ground to make them look bigger so that they'd somehow look more American. My Dutch agent was furious, he said the photo was and an insult to the musicans and was tantramount to racism. I never got why.
I'd found some saucy French magazines under the linoleum in what had once been a teenage boy's bedroom. I cut out some naked, airbrushed ladies and stuck them on the back cover. I thought they were at once elegant, classical, and trashy.
Then the album came out and took an awfully long time to sell not a lot of copies.
I thought about giving up, doing something else, though I can't imagine what. But occasionally I'd get some encouragement – Spex Magazine in Germany carried an article about it, a rave review entitled A Journey Into Sound. Years later I met Greg Cartwright from The Reigning Sound. He told me The Donovan Of Trash was one of his favourite albums of all time. He asked me if I'd like to produce an album for them. But by that time he'd had a few drinks and we were in the car park after the show. It never happened which is probably just as well, if only for my precarious sanity.
Right now I think The Donovan Of Trash sounds pretty good so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.
Teac 3440 four track open reel tape machine, WEM Audiomaster five channel mixer, Shure SM57, Shure SM58, Reslo Ribbon Mic, Watkins Copicat, Vortexion Ferrograph 1/4” two track, Hammond L100, Apollo CL36 compressors (levered from a defunct BBC console), Hofner Senator bass, Hofner Club 60 guitar, Guld D90 acoustic, Ferrograph ribbon mic, Epiphone Coronet guitar, Microfret Spacetone guitar, Jennings Univox, cardboard box with tambourine inside, packing case, gas cannister, pliers, Eko bass guitar, 12 watt Watkins Scout amplifier, 15 watt Selmer Stadium amplifier, AKG BX15 reverb unit, Salvation Army bass drum, approximately one thousand miles of quarter inch Ampex 456 recording tape.
