Roy took up the bass, we started writing new songs, Crash Wanderer was one of them.

(Click here to go to previous blogs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IKQHLNN7Hg

Pressure Player

And it was settled.  Roy bought a bass and we started again a few weeks later, as a four piece.  I saw Steve Byrne some months later and he asked if I was playing in a band and I felt compelled to lie but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  “Yeah, I am as it happens,” I said tentatively.  “We started the band up again and Roy wanted to play bass so that’s what we did.”

To his credit Steve Byrne didn’t complain about it.  Perhaps he knew all along, or perhaps he knew he wasn’t cut out for being in a band and had only agreed to do it because I’d badgered him into it.  Either way, we left on (reasonably) good terms, but it was a long time before I saw him again.  I always felt it was a terrible thing to do, but even though he’s nearly forgiven me, I still feel uncomfortable about it.

But I couldn’t deal with confrontation and that’s what I feared more than anything.  Having said all that, none of the other band members stepped forward to deliver the news, so we were all culpable to some degree.

Crash Wanderer

We continued rehearsing at the Pepperpot and continued writing songs.  Roy and Steve had come up with “People on the Side” plus “Control” and I had written a few other songs, one was called “Security Clothes” and another called “Crash Wanderer”.  On the Buzzcocks album “Love Bites” was a song I liked called “Sixteen Again” and I liked it so much I wrote a song called “Eighteen” as my own version.  I was 18, so that’s where the title came from (it really didn’t get any more complicated than that).

Security Clothes was a song about people blindly following fashion and being judged or ostracised for not conforming.  A bit like I did with punk but of course the irony was lost on me then.  Also, Security Clothes featured the remarkably familiar “D-A-G-A” chord progression.  I’d clearly come to the conclusion that if a melody didn’t fit those chords, then it wasn’t worth writing.

“I was 17 probably (when I started song writing), the process then was definitely lyrics first and then trying to find some chords I could play that fitted the melody.  My songs then were dark because I was inspired by a god-awful childhood.” 

Roy

Hats Off To Roy

Roy’s god-awful childhood consisted of not only living in Harlow (if that wasn’t bad enough), but his mum died when he was two weeks old; his 15 year-old sister left school to look after him, then he was farmed out to relatives in Wales until the age of 10, before returning to Harlow (which is when I met him in the playground of Broadfields school). To top things off for Roy, his dad married a woman who, at best would be described as the personification of the evil stepmother.

“The Dashes play scheme saved me. I wasn’t allowed to be indoors except to eat, sleep and do my homework, even if it was pissing down with rain. So, Sundays were a bit of a problem because the play scheme was closed. So I used to go and sit in the library all day.”

Roy

I think it’s fair to say Roy didn’t have the most stable of upbringings, which given the fact he has done so well for himself, makes him and his life all the more remarkable.

Write More Material

Back on planet Pressure Stops however, I’d had a chorus for a song called Crash Wanderer for some time, since before we had started rehearsing but hadn’t put the rest of it together just yet. But then an odd thing happened.  I wrote the song in the key of B! There wasn’t a “D-A-G-A” in sight.  It was based around the chords “B-E-A” which is ironic given that BEA was an airline and the song was about flying.

British European Airways – Wikipedia

The other odd thing about “Crash Wanderer” was the clunky metaphor between corporate business and aviation.  And we already had a song called “People On The Side” which featured a clunky metaphor between Corporate Business and motor sport.  And nobody noticed until years later.  Which tells its own story about how much notice we took of each other’s lyrics. 

Then between Roy, Steve and myself we wrote “Communication Breakdown” which I was never happy with because Led Zeppelin had a song of the same name.  “Why can’t we come up with something original?” I asked Steve.  “Because I like it,” he replied.   “But what about Zeppelin?” I countered.  “I couldn’t care less about Zeppelin,” he replied,  “so, Zeppelin can fuck off.”  I felt sure I wasn’t going to get any further traction with Steve on this one.²

“I think the thing that really inspired me to write songs actually was, all of a sudden you were given licence to do it, because there were these people standing up on stage looking faintly ridiculous, crashing about, on guitars they couldn’t play and suddenly you didn’t have to be a music graduate.”

Roy

Vancouver

Back at work I was still spending hours a day writing stuff in my head on the train to and from work and sometimes whilst I was at work too.  If a riff comes to you while you’re at your desk you can’t ignore it.  You have to memorise it by playing it over and over in your mind or singing the tune quietly to yourself until it sticks.

The music section of my brain was like a basic computer.  I could store one new riff in memory and could only shift it into long term memory by playing it over and over on the guitar or in my head.  If I heard another piece of music, then it would automatically overwrite my own riff and it would be lost forever.  I wrote the song Crash Wanderer like this.  Singing it over and over in my head until it stuck.

CEO

It was a story of someone who is fȇted when they are successful but forgotten when they’re not.  As I said, I used a clunky metaphor of a pilot losing control of a plane and crashing in a barren wasteland where there’s no radio contact, interspersed with a CEO of a large business losing control of the company he owned, as a way of expressing my opinion on fickle relationships. 

I was attempting to move on from my Lover Next Door nonsense, even though I didn’t view it as nonsense at the time. 

Take this verse for instance:-

“We’re North-West of Vancouver,

Where the ice and snow,

Stretch into the shadows beyond the unknown.

The mangled wreck of my solo flight,

Leaves me here to survive the rest of the night.”

I quite liked it.  I was thinking of a snowy, barren wasteland and came up with Alaska but Alaska didn’t fit with the rhythm of the song, so I looked at a map of the globe and discovered Alaska was North-West of Vancouver and that appeared to fit perfectly and once I had that line, the other lines just came out in an effortless stream of conscious drivel. 

Pressure Park

We tried it out at rehearsals and everyone in the band liked it, so we started practicing it.  I worked on refining the lyrics as I strode home through the Town Park of an evening and developed the arrangement over time as ideas appeared in my mind and I’d try them out on the guitar. 

Solo

I even came up with a small solo for it which I’d never done before.  At this time, I had no knowledge of scales other than the chromatic scale, which isn’t very melodic when it comes to music, so I would hear a solo in my head and I’d try to work it out on the fretboard.  It was this trial-and-error approach which led to the little 12 second lead burst that eventually appeared on the song.  A lead burst I might add, played exclusively on the top E string.  That’s proper guitar work, right there.

As I said, I had no knowledge of scales.  I’d occasionally ask other guitarists about scales and how to play a solo, but it was like some secret code that you had to crack yourself.  It’s how you were judged then, on how proficient you were.  But punk took a lot of that away.  Suddenly the ‘in’ thing was not being able to play, a sort of anti-ability, and of course that suited me perfectly.

“My nickname “Eggy” was from my middle name, Edgar. My sisters used to call me “Roy Eggy Beep Beep”. I used to play with cars a lot when I was young – going, Beep Beep.”

Roy

Now we had some songs and a settled line-up, what we needed was a band name and some gigs. Sadly Eggy & The Chips and R.G. Bargy & The Jostlers weren’t acceptable for a proper band, which is what we thought we were.

We needed something that reflected the difficulties of life in a modern day new town. Or just any old name we quite liked would also have sufficed.

NEXT – PART 10 – CRUEL TO BE KIND

Click here to go back to blogs page

1. I had a ‘thing’ about Jonesy at the time. Unfortunately she didn’t have a ‘thing’ about me, and looking at these pictures I can see why.
2. Later, when Steve came up with the song title “A Day In The Life” I felt compelled to mention the Beatles version, and when I did his response was typically abrupt. “Well, I don’t know what you’re moaning about.  This is called A Day In The Life Of A Single Man.  Happy now?”