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How To Avoid Being A Pop Star

My contribution to this project is respectfully dedicated to

Ngo Achoi

(founder member of UNIT responsible for advertising and promoting our work world wide)

Luc Tran

(current member of UNIT responsible for keyboards, drums, being thoroughly nice to people and for providing a smart little preface like you see for books in fancy pants print)

UJ Cheung

(current member of UNIT responsible for flute, guitar, bass guitar, the website, the e-mail contact and for being a benign boss and a tolerant tyrant)

Obligatory Preface.

UNIT is currently a trio of musicians, artists and film makers who consist of Luc Tran (that’s me), Cheung Yiu Munn (a.k.a. UJ) and Andy Martin. We’ve just released our 13th CD but the spine on it says it’s our 11th album. No, I haven’t quite sussed that out yet either. I don’t like all the music we’ve done – but I can’t think of a single track that isn’t interesting or unusual.

The first phase of our career saw Lawrence Burton, Nathan Coles and Peter Williams join forces with Andy Martin and Dave Fanning, both of whom had previously been in an unsuccessful performance art group called The Apostles in the 1980s. The intention was not only to venture into the avant garde territory that Andy and Dave had investigated during the early years of the 1990s but also to record again, properly and with professional production values, nearly all the works previously committed to old fashioned vinyl by The Apostles. However, much of the decade was spent producing Smile magazine with music definitely taking a subservient role at this time.

From 1994 to 1997, UNIT released their records under the name Academy 23 to avoid confusion with a fairly successful German avant garde group who were also called UNIT. This outfit disbanded early in 1997 so we reverted to our original name with the 7” EP Richard Dawkins Is Together With Us. After 2000, we elected to concentrate mainly on writing, performing and recording new music in as many different styles and genres as we could manage, given the technical limitations of certain group members. Our only tenuous link with the previous format of the group (and The Apostles before that) was our deliberate hostility toward capitalism and the commercial music industry and our support for Class War, the paper and the idea.

 Most people understandably think of UNIT as ‘that group with all the Chinese lads in it’ but this only applies to the second phase of our career which commenced in 1999 when Ngo Achoi, Lang Kin Tung and Gieng San Man joined Andy Martin and Dave Fanning to form what was really a new group. It is this group with which most people are familiar, thanks to the tireless promotion and distribution of our work undertaken first by Achoi and then by UJ, who set up our e-mail account and website. When ‘Sons Of The Dragon’ was released it heralded our intention to put Chinese people on the independent music map. We wanted to prove to the world there was more to us than cooking and kung fu. Rap music had Jin Au Yeung in America and LMF in Hong Kong but in the sphere of pop music, the avant garde and punk rock, the demographic remained resolutely white…so we decided to change all that, despite the open hostility directed at us by certain people in the UK such as Fracture, Idwal Fissure and Head Wound who clearly didn’t want a bunch of Chinkies spoiling their scene.

 Two other group members deserve a shout out: Chinese guitarist and vocalist Garlen Lo and Vietnamese saxophonist Thanh Trung Nguyen. Garlen stayed for just over a year but left the group because he wanted to play only twee little pop songs – nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not what we’re about. Trung, like Garlen, comes from a wealthy background and so, also like Garlen, found our struggle to save up enough money to pay for studio time and release CDs, inexplicable and strange. His musical origins are in jazz, especially the big band jazz of the 1930s – very odd for a 16 year old! He managed to stay with us long enough to appear on all four Rock In Opposition albums and he played at most of our prestigious concerts in 2006 and 2007 but his parents objected to him being in a pop group and they most definitely objected to Andy (many people do) so by the end of 2007 we became a trio.

 If it had not been for Hackney Chinese Youth Club in Ellingfort Road (which, sadly, closed in 2006), UNIT would not exist, at least not in its present state. That was where I met UJ and Andy and that was how I came to join UNIT as a drummer and keyboard player. Garlen Lo is in fact the only member of UNIT who doesn’t originate from HCYC. The famous Birmingham poet Andy Nunn introduced us to the Kill Your Pet Puppy chat room. Through that I discovered the history behind the UK punk scene and I learned about the whole Crass / Class War divide, the miners strike, Margaret Thatcher, Greenham Common, the Poll Tax riots and all the rest of it. To think there was a time when people my age used to go on demonstrations and start riots when the government gave us shabby treatment. Now we just turn on our laptops, plug in our I-pods and download another programme to keep us amused.

 Me? I run my own Chinese take-away – like the man writes in this book, anyone who says money can’t buy happiness just doesn’t know how to spend it properly.

Luc Tran 2009.

LOOK AT LEGEND WITH LOGIC – FIGHT FOLKLORE WITH FACTS!

 Introduction.

 I have played and recorded music professionally since 1997. To date, our group, UNIT, has released 5 singles and 12 albums, most of which have been sold in Europe, America and Scandinavia; we’ve played nearly a hundred concerts. Our works have been played on the radio in Britain and Europe. For these reasons, I can afford to indulge in the arrogance to say that I probably know better how to form and run a music group than most of the readers of this book. I have sufficient experience to know what are the problems most likely to arise and how to avoid the worst of them. I am not usually an exponent of compromise or equivocation. However, I have learnt this crucial lesson. In the absence of mutual respect, no artistic group can flourish or achieve anything of value.

However, all this must be placed in context. I have virtually no experience of the corporate media or the music business. The amateur group in which I was involved (The Apostles) and the professional group in which I am currently involved (UNIT) share one factor in common: they were formulated in the knowledge that we would work outside of the established corporate music and media machine. Indeed whereas The Apostles were basically indifferent to this odious apparatus, UNIT are actively hostile to it and we make it our business to challenge and confront all those who believe it has any value or credibility.

My colleague in this book project, Scruff, is in a rather intriguing position in this respect. I suspect he holds the corporate music business in even greater contempt than I – yet unlike myself, he has experienced frequent encounters with it (most of which have been unpleasant), for many of his ensembles have been sufficiently popular to accrue interest from concert promoters and record companies about which he is able to offer advice, provide warnings and supply anecdotes. So, if you are in a pop group and you want to risk an association with any aspect of the music business then the sections of this book written by Scruff will be of far more use and interest to you than many of my own contributions.

Why Do You Want To Be In A Music Group?

Take 3 people, untrained and uneducated in the composition and performance of music. Their instruments are a banjo, a kazoo and a tin drum. Now, they can make a noise every time they come together, play in fields or car parks and even record themselves on a minidisk player and capture their performances on their cell phones. If I had the choice of joining such an ensemble or of being buggered by badgers in a bog, I’d start to grease my arse straight away.

No, for me, there has to be at least one saxophone in a group for me to even consider it worthy of my presence. Guitars are not essential but keyboards and a bass guitar most definitely are. However, most of all, there must be a degree of technical ability and artistic integrity. Without those 2 attributes, there is no reason for me to belong to a music group. There is a simple reason for this: the less ability you have, the less music you can play. Now, why allow laziness to impose such limitations upon the expression of your imagination and creativity?

In the 2000s I taught music in Hackney Chinese Youth Club every Saturday afternoon. The initial class of 5 young lads lasted barely 3 months before, as I predicted, members began to invent excuses for their absence. By the end of the year, maybe there’d be 1 lad left – often there’d be none at all so I’d sit in that back room in the Chinese Centre, drag out the Play Station and San Andreas then spend the next 2 hours blowing up American policemen with a bazooka.

There is no short cut to playing music properly. If you want to be able to play a saxophone, a guitar or a piano, you need to practise those scales every day. You need to keep yourself fit, especially if you want to play a wind instrument. The problem with those lads at HCYC is they had watched Tze Ting Fung posing with an electric guitar on some grotty little music video and decided that they’d like to do that, too. Tze is a second rate film actor who has musical pretensions but he is very popular in Hong Kong and among British born Chinese. They wanted to be as good as Tze appeared to be but without spending all the hours every week actually learning how to do it. What they failed to appreciate is that Tze Ting Fung is about as musically competent as a cormorant. Those wonderful guitar licks and drum fills are all played by highly trained (and usually Japanese) session musicians. The music is then subjected to some computerised editing programme so everything sounds as if it was played in tune and in time – i.e. it is robot music, false and plastic like everything else in Hong Kong.

Unlike previous decades, now a recording studio can enable you to cheat – there are editing programmes that can make you sound a much better musician than you actually are – but what do you do when it’s time to step up on stage in front of a crowd of people and play live in front of them? Who do you turn to? Besides, how much personal satisfaction can you gain from being a fake, a cheat and a charlatan? Even when a group does employ computer generated editing programmes that make NASA look infantile, they will only be treated with any respect and honour if they can deliver the goods in reality. The German rave / metal crossover outfit Rammstein deploy considerable electronic resources to record their albums with samples, computerised editing programmes and all the digital paraphernalia associated with 21st century pop music but these are never used to disguise technical ineptitude – their live concerts provide ample evidence of their proficiency as musicians. When technological hardware is used in the service of music, it is a useful tool; when it is used as a replacement for creativity, originality and technical ability, it is a tyrant.

However, you may deliberately choose to be in a group where nobody can actually play very well. This is not so daft as it may sound since it is actually possible to be in a financially successful group without any of the band members being able to play their instruments very well, Oasis being a perfect example. Most punk bands contain people who not only cannot read or write music and who do not bother to learn to play their instruments or sing properly but who actually believe such an attitude to be laudable. Their exponents claim that technical prowess is suspect and, if in doubt, should be treated with derision. I have absolutely no doubt that such an attitude is an insult to audiences everywhere and is adopted purely to disguise the fact that the proponents of punk rock are too lazy and too selfish to be bothered to learn their craft properly. Well, let them make their facile little noises and see how many people still play their records 50 years from now.

These days, I don’t believe there can be many people in the world who honestly believe that if they form a pop group (vocals, guitar, bass guitar and drums – yawn), write a few twee songs about nothing in particular, using those same old tired chord progressions, rehearse this crap for a few weeks, play a gig in a youth club then support some middle aged blues rock outfit in the local pub and finally record 3 songs in a second rate studio which they send on a CDR to a few record companies, they will end up on MTV next year and enjoy a lucrative career as pop stars. Surely few people can be so naïve now?  

However, more to the point is this question: why would anyone want to be in a music group? A music group can be a drum’n’bass outfit (The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Pendulum), a straight pop group (Flintlock, The Arctic Monkeys, Glasvegas) or a bunch of rappers (The Streets, So Solid Crew, Dizzy Rascal), but the question remains: why do you want to be in such a group? This isn’t such an inane question as it may at first appear. The initial Pavlovian response is ‘to play music, obviously’. Well, that is usually part of the reason but rarely is it the only reason.

Be warned: I make no attempt to disguise my own musical tastes. I have endeavoured not allow these to affect adversely the validity of any comments made but there will be occasional remarks prone to the liberal use of sarcasm, ridicule or sheer, simple nastiness that are provoked by certain purveyors of music that I find too disgusting not to subject to whatever form of abuse I deem necessary (primarily though not exclusively to be found among the punk rock and disco fraternity). I’d almost sell my soul for heavy metal, free jazz or avant garde classical works so please don’t waste your time being offended if I am occasionally less than charitable about punk rock, country and western or rock and roll, three genres for which I have scant respect other than a grudging admission that country and western does at least require a fair degree of technical ability to perform properly, unlike the other two genres. However, while I don’t like to listen to nor do I have any interest in (apart from on a political level) reggae as a style of music, I do have considerable respect for it and its performers.

Companionship – in this case it is not necessary to join the music business although it may prove useful to do so should you seek fame and fortune. Beware: the corporate music business promotes avarice, egotism and subservience to the media bag – none of which are properties convivial to the establishment of honourable friendships. If your group consists of a bunch of friends who enjoy being creative together then, if you wish to maintain those friendships, avoidance of the music business is generally advisable.

The concept of a group of friends devoted to the performance of high quality music seems an ideal. One thinks, obviously, of the Amadeus Quartet who shared 3 decades playing chamber music of the classical era until the death of their viola player prompted the group to disband and consequently retire as an active unit. From the height of Parnassus we plunge into the gutter and consider another quartet, Status Quo, who also shared 3 decades as a group performing utterly dire third rate rock music which was yet enjoyed by many thousand of non-discerning audiences around the world. However, with the former group, when the viola player died, the possibility of his replacement (so the quartet could continue) was never an option. To have adopted such a course would have been a breach of loyalty, you see.

In the 2 groups of which I have been a member, The Apostles and UNIT, we have found it expedient to adopt a rather more mercenary practise with regard to personnel. Indeed, by 1989 when The Apostles ended, not one original group member remained. The name was retained throughout the period since it described a concept rather than being reliant upon certain key individuals. In UNIT, only myself and Cheung Yiu Munn remain from the original group. This became necessary – indeed essential – since the nature of the group required specific commitments from group members which previous incumbents were unable to honour. The avant garde German group Faust have taken this further, indeed to its logical conclusion: younger members have been admitted into the group to enable it to continue. It was acknowledged and accepted that the original members would eventually become too old to continue as performing musicians so younger personnel were quite intentionally drafted in as replacements. Thus it is quite conceivable that Faust, although formed in 1970, could still be in operation in 2070 since the group concept is vastly more important than the composition of the group personnel.

There was one nameless buffoon (who perhaps meant well but still managed to fall flat on his face) who wrote that the average life span of a rock group was 3 years. He insisted that any group that stayed together after this time tended to revert to formulaic music and produce work of negligible value. I suggest this notion is derived (with some justification) from a practise that became habitual during the 1960s but even then only applies to commercial pop groups funded by the corporate music business. In all other cases, this ‘3 year rule’ has been proved utterly spurious. However, I can allow one reason for this period to prove popular as the perceived life span of a pop group. Almost all pop groups are formed by teenagers who, by their nature, seek to expand horizons and explore possibilities (or at least they should do if they are worthy of being called human beings). It is likely to be extremely rare to find 4 or 5 teenagers who form a pop group with a set of initial ideals and who are still together as a band a decade later since some of them will no doubt have realised that being in a pop group is not for them while others will want to explore musical or political directions divergent from the other group members. I would argue that while Status Quo, Slade and The Ramones (to take 3 examples) did indeed retain the same 4 people in each group for many decades, their initial artistic intentions are unlikely to have been either especially complex or particularly profound.

There is one serious problem that arises from a group formed by close friends. If Sharon has written an utterly crap song that really should be taken out into the back yard and shot like a dog, who will have the heart to tell her? Consider Pete Townsend of The Who (a beat group from the 1960s who did indeed use up all their interesting ideas in less than 3 years but who, unfortunately, droned interminably on for a further 2 decades). He went so far as to suggest that if a group is to produce really high quality work then the members should all hate each other since then nobody will be reluctant to criticise poor grade playing or writing. This initially sounds a promising idea but on closer inspection is ridiculous. If Wayne elects not to tell Sharon that her beloved ballad is in fact absolutely dire then he has no right to consider himself a friend. If mutual hatred is required before honesty can be attained then humanity may as well pack up and return to the primordial soup since it has no place on a planet it shares with dolphins.

In ‘This Is Spinal Tap’, that seminal satire of a documentary about the archetypal heavy rock group, the band finally fall to pieces once the rhythm guitarist invites his girlfriend over from England to advise them on how to revive their diminishing fortunes. Consider what happened to The Beatles when John Lennon invited Yoko Ono over from Japan to join them in their increasingly facile attempts to pretend they were more than just a twee little pop group with a few good tunes. If you are in a band and one of the members tries to persuade you to let his girlfriend / her boyfriend to join the group – sack him / her immediately. Unless drastic action is taken at once, the group will collapse, horribly and completely. You see, as soon as a husband and wife team are introduced into a pop group, the social dynamic is utterly and irrevocably destroyed beyond repair. From that moment you are no longer in a group – you are in a couple with a backing band. Couples and pop groups are mutually exclusive – it is a combination forever doomed to failure.

In the early days of UNIT it was often the case that I would entertain some highly amusing post-modern wheeze and one or more colleagues would be obliged to inform me that, actually, it really would not be such a good idea after all. For example, I suggested that it would be highly entertaining if myself and Dave Fanning, then the only white Caucasian members of UNIT, recorded a version of Young, Gifted & Black, a popular reggae number from the 1960s, which would then be followed by the other group members (1 Vietnamese and 3 Chinese) recording their version of White Power, a popular anthem against immigration by nationalist group Skrewdriver. At the time we were financially insecure and we had a backlog of material of our own that had yet to be recorded. Their objection was that the time, energy and money required to record these 2 works would be better spent producing our own music. In retrospect I believe they were correct, even though the idea amused them. Objection sustained.

Niggers, Pakis, Birds & Poufs – how to approach minorities within pop groups. Now, from the 1960s onwards, the prime purveyors of rock music insisted that it provided the ideal platform from which to challenge racism, sexism and, after the 1970s, homophobia. As we shall discover later, rock music rarely challenges anything of value and certainly cannot be said ever to have been responsible for any significant change in our society. Even well into the 21st century, it still makes sense to most people if I state that the majority of rock groups feature members who are male in gender, of white Caucasian origin and strictly heterosexual. If this is because rock music is irrelevant or not of interest to women, homosexuals and people who are not Caucasian, then I could accept that as a natural state of affairs. However, I don’t believe that for one second. Most homosexuals tend to exhibit a dire penchant for disco, robot noise and camp trash but there might be a tiny minority who appreciate music of quality. Black people may prefer soul, reggae, rap and jazz but to marginalize the interests of the majority of the world population seems somewhat invidious. Besides, my own experience has revealed to me precisely what happens when Africans, Asians and Orientals join rock groups – they are confronted with a kind of racism that is generally far more offensive than any they are liable to find at a skinhead gig.

Let me state first that if your band members are all white nationalists who believe racism is healthy then be honest about it – stand proud and celebrate it – don’t bother trying to disguise your ideals because they will be discovered sooner or later and then you’ll be open to blackmail at the worst or, at best, open ridicule. The gutter press, trendy liberal media and socialist government in Britain have tried to insist we live in a multi-cultural society and that we should all accept this is The Natural Order. What about people who disagree with that? Well, they are immediately ostracised and actually vilified as being evil, nasty and utterly unacceptable. I have met a fair number of honest and thoroughly decent members of the British National Party. I’ve even met a couple of honest and thoroughly decent members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I don’t agree with many of their political beliefs but that’s not important – what is important is that the former fellows are not allowed to expect the same degree of respect immediately accorded to some lunatic communist who, given the chance, would have anyone slightly different, especially someone who expresses individuality, working in the salt mines or, better still, put to death (but humanely, obviously, because socialists love humanity). Since I can walk into HMV in Oxford Street and buy CDs by gangsta rap outfits whose lyrics celebrate murder, violence, drug abuse, the rape of women and the degradation of Jews then I should also be able to buy CDs by Day Of The Sword, Volkszorn, Razors Edge and Skrewdriver – but I can’t. These latter CDs are not available outside specialist mail order companies, most of which are sited in America. If you are in a rock group that promotes white nationalism then it is essential you accept that you will never be allowed the same basic rights and respect awarded to other bands. That this state of affairs is odious and completely unjust is, unfortunately, irrelevant here – it is a fact and you will require formidable reserves of courage, tenacity and perseverance in order to survive.

On the other hand if you are in a group whose tenets include a desire to challenge and confront racism, sexism and homophobia then you may find it a little difficult to be convincing if all your group members are male, white and heterosexual. Obviously, such a group should still express their beliefs but they should do so because that is what they genuinely believe, not because they think it will help them sell more records and encourage more people to attend their concerts. This is an aspect of what I referred to earlier as a kind of racism that is generally far more offensive than that encountered at a skinhead gig. In the 1980s arch loony lefties the Socialist Workers Party (or, more accurately, the Social Workers Party) claimed to support the striking miners against the Thatcher government. In truth, the SWP never gave a damn about the miners because the miners were working class and these same miners were profoundly disinterested in anything written by Karl Marx. The SWP adopted the miners as their pet campaign for the 1980s because here was a disaffected section of the working class who could be used to bolster sales of their paper and improve the credibility of their own reputation. There is only one cause communists ever genuinely care about: the cause of communism. Should the union jack ever be replaced by the hammer and sickle, those striking miners will soon have to go back to work and God help any of them who hold political or religious beliefs that run contrary to the tenets of the New Socialist British Peoples Republic.  

If an otherwise male group has a female member, it is a common but unfortunate error for them to assume that she will want to write about feminist issues while the lads deal with all the other political matters. In a similar manner, a token non-white group member is most likely to be saddled with the obligation to address issues of racism because that’s his / her department. Such a blatantly patronising attitude is offensive even though the other band members no doubt harbour laudable intentions. This is why groups such as The Wall and The Monochrome Set were so welcome. The Wall were a minor but highly intelligent pop group from the early 1980s who managed to survive their initial punk rock origin to release some genuinely interesting records for a brief period. Their bass guitarist was female but that was all – no fuss, no mess, just pure impact. The Monochrome Set included an Indian guitarist but they didn’t spend time writing songs about racism – there was no need since the mere existence of an Indian in an otherwise white pop group was itself a significant political statement. When John Soares was in The Apostles, the anti-racist anthems were written by Dave Fanning and I. Soares wrote songs about drugs and fashion (that, while simplistic, were probably more honest than some of my more pompous rants). When UNIT were formed with 3 Chinese members, the arrangements of traditional Chinese tunes were made by me – when they wrote works for the group, they were influenced more by Oasis and Rage Against The Machine than by Beyond, Tze Ting Fung or LMF. While Kwan Siu Lung did choose to write about subjects related to Chinese people, he set the texts to music that owed nothing to Chinese melody or harmony.

Finally, to conclude this section, it is my sad duty to report that many apparently inseparable friendships formed while people make music together in various ensembles are apt to fade into air, into thin air, once the music group dissolves or is otherwise terminated. Of all the people who have been in The Apostles and UNIT and who acted as if they were friends of mine at the time, only 2 have proved sincere; only 2 have revealed their friendship to be genuine. Chris Low (The Apostles) and Lawrence Burton (UNIT) I salute you.

Creative Fulfilment – in this case it will be necessary to avoid the music business entirely unless what you wish to create happens to be fashionable at the time. Even then, the music business will inevitably modify your work to suit its own agenda. This ultimately will result in artistic compromises incompatible with your conscience that you will eventually find intolerable. No, it is virtually impossible to attain creative fulfilment and be a part of the music business – the two are generally mutually exclusive.

However, once you are part of a group, then the problems arise, almost from day one. Say you are a singer. You’ve written some lyrics of which you are particularly proud. The keyboard player is a Christian and resents the political content of one of those songs, which you regard as probably the best poem you’ve ever written. The bass player thinks it’s excellent but doesn’t like the music. The drummer doesn’t care either way so long as he can play that tricky little passage in 5/4 after the second verse. Do you abandon what may be your best song in order to keep the group content or find yourself a keyboard player with a brain? One solution to such a problem is to impose a group rule from day one that allows total artistic freedom for each member such that everyone is allowed to write whatever lyrics and music they wish, on the understanding that, for example, while the God bothering keyboard player has to accept the political content of that troublesome song, the singer can’t object when the keyboard player writes an appreciation of Saint Francis for the next concert.

Individual creative fulfilment may appear to require the complete subservience of the other group members to The Leader. It is he / she who writes all the lyrics and music, who decides which decisions will be taken and what course the group will take. This format, while apparently somewhat odious, can even be successful as is proved by The Groundhogs, Jethro Tull, X Ray Spex, The Jam, Oasis, The Arctic Monkeys and Glasvegas. In each of these 7 groups, one person writes nearly all the material and acts as the supreme leader, for better or worse. This is acceptable if the other group members agree to this format and if the leader has sufficient talent and ability to justify his or her position. Problems arise when other group members wish to have their own works recorded and performed (The Groundhogs, Jethro Tull, Oasis) and the führer either refuses to accede to this thoroughly justifiable request or relents but with considerable ill grace. In one group from the 1970s, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, the erstwhile leader (John McLaughlin) actually caused the other 4 members of his outfit to resign in protest at his extreme egotism and selfishness when he vetoed the release of an album because it featured 3 tracks each written by one of the other group members. After this band finally collapsed, a CD was issued posthumously of the album and the 3 offending tracks (one each by the bass guitarist Rick Laird, keyboard player Jan Hammer and violin player Jerry Goodman) were so obviously superior to the tedious drivel written by McLaughlin that one can only wonder how much more interesting and vital this generally onerous group might have sounded had the others been granted equal opportunities to contribute music to the group.

In the case of The Jam, singer and guitarist Paul Weller proved he possessed sufficient compositional ability to justify his position as leader although there were rare occasions when tracks by one of the other two were featured, such as the scintillating instrumental Circus on their final album. That the trio stayed together as a unit also speaks volumes – evidently Weller treated his colleagues with rather more respect than, say, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull since that bunch of hippie dinosaurs suffered more changes in personnel than the leadership of the Labour Party.

Because I suffer from severe dispraxia, it was always to be inevitable that I’d never be a serious performer on any musical instrument. To compensate, I taught myself to read and write music. I also took time to study harmony and counterpoint since I believed that what was good enough for Joseph Haydn would be good enough for any mere pop group in which I was involved. Experience has proved beyond any doubt that this belief has been thoroughly vindicated. Harmonically my works are generally far more advanced and interesting than about 70% of all the rock and pop music written over the past 40 years. This may also be part of the reason why thousands of people buy our albums while tens of thousands of people buy albums by most other apparently more musically conservative groups!

I approached texts with equal diligence. I studied the classics at a young age and learned to appreciate on a purely technical level what these writers produced. Homer, Ovid, Virgil, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, William Blake, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, T S Elliot, Yukio Mishima, W H Auden and Anthony Burgess all showed me what was possible in the creative usage of language. (Incidentally, I discovered Milton, Blake and Mishima to be three prime purveyors of the most boring, unmitigated drivel ever committed to print but I don’t regret the time I spent reading their works.) Later I used this knowledge and applied the discipline to my own texts and lyrics.

I even attempted to read Johann Von Göthe, Friedrich Hölderlein and Georg Trakl in the original German. I eventually succeeded but later I resorted to high quality English translations since this was less time consuming! I mention this because a working knowledge of German enabled me to enter into a mode of thought that would have impossible in my native English. I rarely set the words of other writers to my music since it is more honest and sensible to use my own texts, particularly because I am able to write finely crafted lyrics of a high technical quality that has been widely acknowledged over the years, even (albeit grudgingly) from my many detractors. The Chilean poet Gaston Salvatore (who wrote almost exclusively in German) is the only writer whose texts I have ever been compelled to set on a regular basis to my own music. In the 1990s I studied Mandarin Chinese and again, while I was far less successful than my attempt at German, I believe I understood the frequent absence of subtlety in so much Chinese art forms since the language itself is so direct even if its manner of speech is highly sophisticated and needlessly complex.

The previous three paragraphs have not actually been an indulgent digression. As you begin to start writing your own pieces of music, you may wish to discover how to modulate into different keys in an unusual yet effective manner that sounds convincing rather than contrived. Spend a week listening to and studying the work of Johann Sebastian Bach and Sergei Prokofiev, preferably with the scores if you can read music. Now return to your own music and notice the difference! Consider this: at the end of the 1970s a grim, depressing pop group called Joy Division became immensely popular. By 1980 there must have been at least 20 other groups in Britain who shamelessly attempted to sound just like them. Out of all these, only one, Lack Of Knowledge, actually achieved any real artistic success and they were the one group who abandoned their early love of the Joy Division sound in favour of forging their own identity. You will never achieve creative fulfilment by emulating the work of others. It is useful – perhaps even essential – to become acquainted with the work of other composers, writers and artists. Rarely is great art created in a vacuum. However, with one exception, it is not healthy to be overtly influenced by the styles of other people.

The exception is the work of other people who are in your group. Although I have always much preferred the sound of bass guitars to ordinary guitars, it was only when I listened to Dave Fanning (a founder member of UNIT) play a bass guitar as a melody instrument that I realised what was possible and this directly influenced the manner in which I wrote music for the instrument. I had not discovered the music of Yes at this time so I was unaware that their bass guitarist, Chris Squire, had already explored one variant of this work. Shortly after Ngo Achoi joined UNIT, he developed an almost obsessive interest in the vibraphone and he would use one (when available) or a sample of one, on most tracks, even on those where I would previously have suspected its inclusion to be inappropriate. Achoi left UNIT in 2007 yet Luc has continued this frequent use of the vibraphone and my own ability to write for the instrument has improved as a result. A consequence of all this is that UNIT has come to possess a most distinctive musical personality that is immediately recognisable. If from the start U-J had imposed his will upon the group in Ian Anderson mode, that vibraphone would never have been heard! When Luc wrote Ming Hai, one of the best instrumentals we’ve ever recorded, he openly admitted he was influenced not only by my own use of shifting harmonies and unusual chord progressions but also by the use of compound metres favoured by Dave and Achoi when they were in the group. So, if you are The Writer of the music in your group, never dismiss the contributions of the other members – they may have something useful and original to offer that had not occurred to you.

 Political Propaganda – in this case it will definitely be absolutely essential to avoid the music business at all times. This requires qualification. If you seek to adopt a trendy political image with concomitant lyrics to match this then the music business may be interested if your political image is fashionable and therefore one from which they can accrue profits. This will only remain the case while that particular political ideology remains trendy and thus profitable. Of course if you have no scruples whatsoever and are quite prepared to adopt the rhetoric of crisis in an attempt to boost your credibility and thus increase record sales, then there is no problem. Clearly you will have wrestled with your conscience and, after a battle royal, emerged the winner. A truly disgusting little punk band called The Clash joined forces with a major American capitalist record company to utilise this scheme in the most vile manner possible: multinational corporation CBS poured money and resources into supporting their pet little British band during the late 1970s when agitational propaganda was sufficiently fashionable to assure healthy record sales. The Tom Robinson Band, another bunch of snivelling socialists, quite shamelessly signed to EMI, despite their knowledge that this same company funded Thorn Electronics who manufactured intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Yanks.

 Note: I referred to CBS above as a ‘capitalist record company’. Such a blatant tautology would not normally be tolerable but some of you may still be under the impression that there can be alternatives. Well, what is a record company? Basically, a record company is a firm created by a group of people to pay for the manufacture, production, distribution and sale of records. If nobody purchases the records, the company makes no profits or, more accurately, loses its funds, becomes bankrupt and enters into liquidation. Therefore the company must take steps to ensure the records are more likely to sell. Enter the A&R man, the marketing man, the advertising man and all the paraphernalia associated with the music business, an apparatus with which, to my eternal glory, I have managed never to become acquainted.

 Now I have no criticism of a group of people who collude to form a record company. I accept the basic precepts of capitalism – indeed, as an ardent opponent of communism for nearly 2 decades now, I could hardly object to them. However, I do insist on honesty. Therefore, whether we speak of The Clash who released records in the 1970s on CBS or Glasvegas who release records on Warner Brothers in the 2000s, the result is the same: pop groups making music for money, whose recordings are made available on discs which are purchased by the public. Ideally, the pop group realise the record company has no interest in music and they accept this, just as the record company realises the pop group need not concern itself with financial matters; all they need do is keep the tunes rolling in. Ideally, the record company makes a profit and so does the pop group. Ideally, both participants in the deal are fully aware of their own contribution to the scheme (they are mutual parasites) so that provided the records sell and people attend the concerts, everyone’s a winner, baby.

 What I resent most emphatically is the sheer hypocrisy and utter fraud of wretched little pop groups who adopt the pretence of political commitment purely in order to accrue financial gains from record sales and concert ticket receipts. When a punk band strides onto the stage at the Hammersmith Odeon and sings about poverty in Africa, using amplifiers, speakers and instruments that cost more money than most poor African families will see in a decade, I become befuddled by indecision: do I reach for a bucket in which to vomit abundantly or a Schmeisser sub-machine gun to annihilate such an insult to humanity? The Clash, UB40 and U2 are the most despicable examples of this odious trend but there are plenty of others. If you’re going to be a capitalist then at least have the courage and decency to stand up like a man and be honest about it – give me John Redwood over Bob Geldoff any time of day. On the other hand, if you possess a genuine political agenda which you seek to propagate via your music (for example, if you seek to attack capitalism, if you seek to criticise liberal multiracialism, if you wish to promote communism, if you wish to promote fascism, if you wish to promote anarchism or indeed if you want to promote an intelligent discourse in any political arena) then you will have to remain austerely independent since every record company, concert promoter and radio station will treat you like carriers of bubonic plague.

 Anyone who has ever read any of my previous magazine interviews or essays will be aware that I possess utter contempt for the politics of anarcho-punk bands like Crass and their ilk. I hold their music even lower in my esteem. However (and this is important), I have never found offensive the manner in which Crass released records, organised concerts or treated their audiences or fellow bands. Their behaviour in this respect rarely warranted any criticism at all. They opposed the music business and they opposed state capitalism. The manner in which they conducted their business offered adequate proof of this and never can they be accused of being either hypocritical or fraudulent. They were profoundly decent people who provided a welcome oasis of honesty in (or rather, instead of) an industry that thrived on pretence and deceit. It’s just a real shame their politics were crap and their music was abysmal. Note: there are quite literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world who clearly don’t share my opinion as their record sales reveal!

 In 2005 UNIT released the first of a series of 4 albums called Rock In Opposition. These 5 albums (the 2nd album of the set consisted of 2 discs) constitute our most overtly political statements so far. The texts range from the use of slave and child labour by Nike and Gap in south east Asia, the disgusting treatment of Chinese sailors by the British government after their sterling service during world war two and the destruction of natural environments by pollution perpetrated by McDonalds and Coca Cola to the brutal horror of the apartheid regime inflicted on Arabs in Palestine by the Jewish occupation force. Well, all that sounds most worthy, doesn’t it? We must have spent nearly £15,000 recording those tracks in a professional studio, pressing the discs and printing the booklets. I prefer not to calculate the total cost of the equipment and instruments we used. How many poor families in, say, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Laos or Cambodia would be pleased we spent so much money releasing those compact discs? Would they all be grateful that we did not do something eccentric like send the money to them instead?

I write all this in an effort to elucidate the problems that beset the erstwhile revolutionary who seeks to change the world by releasing records and playing rock music on a stage. Real social change is more liable to be achieved by demonstrations, riots, education and political activism. After all, how many political prisoners were ever freed because a pop group released a record called ‘Free Political Prisoners’? In my experience I have found that films and literature can generate paradigm shifts in society. When a dramatised documentary called Cathy Come Home (by Ken Loach) was shown in the television in 1966, the whole nation responded as the plight of homeless people suddenly became public knowledge whereas previously whole swathes of society remained in blissful ignorance of the problem. Two books provide examples of how radical movements can be encouraged in society – the thoroughly risible and vastly over-rated 1984 by the equally thoroughly risible and vastly over-rated George Orwell and the infinitely superior Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, a writer of far higher calibre (who also possessed a rather more realistic appreciation of politics). It is impossible to read Bertrand Russell and not be influenced in some profound manner by his writing. There is not one pop group in the history of music able to evoke a similar effect. In the 1980s, a popular political newspaper called Class War achieved more political awareness and educated a greater variety of the population than any amount of pop songs or punk drivel.

 At the risk of over-egging the pudding, I shall emphasise this last matter still further. Class War and The Apostles were almost contemporaries: the first issue of Class War was published early in 1982 while the first record by The Apostles was released late in 1983. Class War continues to this day, of course, while The Apostles finally collapsed in 1989, to the considerable relief of all concerned. Who purchased records by The Apostles? Those few punks who realised the whole pacifist / vegetarian / peace movement farce was a complete political cul-de-sac, rather more students (particularly those who were generally politically active) and many disaffected and dispossessed people (generally below the age of 30) around the world. Who purchased copies of Class War? Those few punks who realised the whole pacifist / vegetarian / peace movement farce was a complete political cul-de-sac, rather more students (particularly those who were generally politically active) and many disaffected and dispossessed people (generally below the age of 30) around the world plus workers in motor car factories, shop-keepers, coal miners and many ordinary working class people whose open hostility to global capitalism was thoroughly justifiable. The Apostles appealed to students and vanguard elitists – Class War appealed to (almost) everyone. If you really want to change the world, form an armed, citizens militia and take over your local radio and television stations. Don’t bother with pop groups and political songs because they waste time, money and resources that can better be expended elsewhere. People who genuinely seek social liberation and personal freedom through political change do not have the time to form pop groups because they are too busy doing important work.

 Financial Profit & Security – in this case you will need to join the music business as soon as possible although you will find this initially difficult. In fact, if you are in a pop group of some kind, the possibility that a record company will even agree to finance your ridiculous adolescent fantasies (let alone allow you to make a profit on your work) is so remote that you really should consider a proper career that serves a social function and forget the absurd notion that anyone is ever going to pay you to play pop music. For every Oasis, Arctic Monkeys or Glasvegas there are 90 no hopers for whom stardom will forever remain a futile daydream. This is not necessarily because the music and lyrics of these unsuccessful groups are trite or third rate – on the contrary, I suspect many pop groups in the country are really interesting and intelligent but the music business desires neither interest nor intelligence. Actually, intelligent pop groups are avoided by the music business because they are more difficult to cheat, control and manipulate.

A record company is concerned with marketing an image in order to maximise the acquisition of profits. It is a commonly held misconception that people in the music business (record companies, radio stations and publications) must obviously be interested in music. Unfortunately this is rarely the case. When the music press wrote about Oasis in the 1990s, the hack writers concentrated on their interest in sex, football, alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Now I see nothing undesirable in being interested in any of these items – let’s face it, I’d rather spend an evening with such a chap who knows how to enjoy life than a social worker who collects copies of gardeners world. However, in the case of music journalists, we have to remember that they are generally failed musicians themselves or people who seek to build reputations by meeting famous celebrities because they have nothing creative to offer the world themselves. Therefore, music journalists rarely take much interest in the music played by a band – he (sometimes she – usually he) will want his readers to believe he is conversant with the latest trends and fashions. He will also have been told by his editor what stance to adopt with regard to this or that band.

Record companies are concerned purely with selling products to consumers – the content of the products becomes almost irrelevant so long as the image has been successfully marketed and thus will appeal to the target audience. So in the case of, for example, The Arctic Monkeys, the record company worked in tandem with the music press to promote an image of young working class people from northern England as a new device by which to entice interest from consumers. Fashions are generally cyclic and we can see that in the previous decade, this role was fulfilled by Oasis. The locale has simply moved from Manchester to Sheffield. No doubt in 2025, public interest in a new pop group will be created, this time from, say, Lancaster or Newcastle. For a record company the great advantage of promoting a group of working class lads (and it usually is lads – lassies are harder to manipulate) is that they will generally originate from financially insecure homes and be poorly educated. Such people are relatively easy to manipulate since they are unlikely to understand legal contracts and their relative poverty means they are liable to be amenable to financial inducements to behave in a manner desired by the record company bosses.

Even if you are in a pop group that just happens to be the one in a hundred that generates the interest and support of a record company and the music journalists, that itself is no guarantee you will ever make any money for yourselves. In the 1970s there was a very popular and internationally famous group from Scotland called The Bay City Rollers who enjoyed considerable success with regard to concert attendances and record sales with many of their singles reaching the top ten chart positions. By the end of the decade the group had disbanded and all 5 members then spent the next twenty years trying to recoup royalties from record company executives, without success. However, let me reiterate this because it is important: there is neither shame nor embarrassment associated with a person who seeks to acquire money.

When people tell you that money can’t buy happiness, they merely reveal that they don’t know how to spend it properly.

Sexual Advancement – in this case it will probably be better to join the music business if you can since, while independent groups and artists may be perceived as somewhat wild, windswept and interesting, a healthy bank balance tends to be more attractive to the opposite sex than fair-isle sweaters and ponytails. Besides, concert promoters, record companies and managers are paid to provide successful bands with industrial amounts of drugs, alcohol, junk food and sex workers. I am all in favour of sex, drugs and rock and roll provided these are not worshiped as false idols. However, since I am in an independent group never owned by a record company, since I am queer (and therefore celibate), since I am abnormally ugly, since I am straight edge (apart from rolling tobacco) and since my idea of an exciting night out is to sit at home with a cup of tea and watch The Ascent Of Man, I am hardly qualified to write anything further on this subject as I am obviously far too boring to do so.

The promotion of pop music celebrities as sexually desirable idols probably commenced with Elvis Presley. This alone reveals the level of cunning stunt the media machine is able to perform. After all, any group of people able to make girls wet their knickers over a fat, dim witted mothers boy who supplied the CIA with information about any fellow artistes suspected of socialist sympathies must possess virtually mystical powers of manipulation. However, the process was modified during the 1960s via the first Brit Pop invasion (The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones and so on) until record companies, music journalists and the television executives, working closely together as usual, had consolidated the power of the media industry by the 1970s to form a disgusting edifice that was apparently unassailable. These vile perverts soon realised that SEX SELLS and so every 3 months they would wheel out another bunch of bland pretty boys in order to cajole gullible teenagers into making frequent financial transactions, the profits from which rarely added substantially to the bank accounts of the musicians themselves.

Ego Satiation – in this case, while joining the music business is not essential it is still advisable since your desires are more likely to be fulfilled. If you want to be adored by a large audience, written about in the national press and interviewed by the media then joining the corporate circus is essential since they know best how to create public interest in people who themselves may be completely uninteresting. Only thus could ordinary people be persuaded to entertain an obsession with David Beckham, Posh Spice or Robbie Williams since all 3 people have absolutely nothing of value or substance to offer society with the exception of Beckham who can, at least, play a decent game of football.

A study of the damage that can be caused by egotism in the creative arts is fraught with difficulty because in the absence of the ego, it is likely that very few people would ever be motivated to paint pictures, write books, make films and create music. However, current readers may care to ask their parents (or grandparents) if they are at all familiar with the groups ELP and Egg, two progressive rock groups who released records and played concerts in the 1970s. ELP were far better known than Egg and this should come as no surprise, the reason for which will soon become apparent. ELP featured a keyboard player, a bass guitar player who doubled as a singer and a drummer. Egg featured a keyboard player, a bass guitar player who doubled as a singer and a drummer. That both these groups sounded profoundly different to each other is due primarily to their attitude toward the music they wrote and played.

In Egg (Dave Stewart, Mont Campbell and Clive Brooks), a curious fusion of European classical, jazz and rock music blended without ever being ‘jazz-rock’ or overtly ‘classical’ in style or genre. There were rarely any solo spots for any of the players; rather if ever a single instrument did adopt a lead role briefly then this was only ever because it made logical sense to the music as a whole. The group created highly original pieces that utilised inventive structures within a thoroughly unpredictable harmonic language. There is an introverted, chamber music quality to most of their works; this is a valuable property that is not generally found in the music of other groups of this era where empty bombast and huge rhetorical gestures were destined to accrue greater audience enthusiasm.

In ELP (Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer), much fuss was made at the time over the pedigree enjoyed by all 3 members – Emerson had previously been in a similar trio called The Nice, Lake had previously been in another highly successful group called King Crimson and Palmer had briefly been in a minor but still successful outfit called Atomic Rooster. All 3 band members struggled to grab the limelight for themselves. This clash of egos was particularly acute in the case of Emerson and Lake whose arguments and tantrums reached Spinal Tapian dimensions. Emerson purchased for himself a crane device which enabled him to play a grand piano while he and the piano were lifted into the air and spun around, arse over tit, while Palmer paid for a solid steel drum kit to be constructed which, being so heavy, once fell through the stage and crashed onto the ground below. Lake, believing himself to be severely upstaged by these antics, purchased a shag pile carpet from India which cost over £2,000; this was for him (and only him) to stand on when they performed live in front of audiences whose quality control knobs must have by this time been set to ‘stand by’ mode.

But enough of this dinosaur charade, what about more modern music? In 2002 New Order released an album that was easily as impressive as any of their earlier works. Rammstein have actually improved the quality of their material since their first offering in 1995 – their most recent album from 2007 is a vast improvement on their work of the previous decade and, while their oeuvre has always been limited to a narrow range of musical styles, they have managed to maintain high standards in their lyrics, music and artwork. Who are the leaders of those two groups? I posit that there are none and furthermore, that these groups have survived so long as creative units just because there is no discernible hierarchical structure. However, it is usually the case that WHEN EVERYONE IS SOMEONE, THEN NO-ONE IS ANYONE (Status Quo, AC/DC, The Ramones). In other words, it can often be advantageous to a group if there are 1 or 2 leaders who are sufficiently talented to motivate the other group members into maintaining high standards in their creativity. This only continues to function so long as these leaders are not allowed to become dictators, for if that happens, the group invariably collapses into farce (The Fall), dissolves into lassitude (Oasis) or becomes entrenched in an artistic cul-de-sac (The Arctic Monkeys); to date, there are no known cures for these afflictions. In these cases one has to be cruel to be kind and such groups, when plagued with these agues, should be put out of their audiences’ misery.

 What Kind Of Music Do You Want To Play?

If you play a piano accordion and your favourite group is The Dubliners then it really is probably futile for you to answer the ‘musicians wanted’ advertisement in Kerrang by a group calling itself The Suckers Of Satan’s Cock unless you actually enjoy being beaten to a pulp by hairy trolls who judge each others’ credibility by how many ASBOs they’ve accrued this month. In music papers you can read about people who have stormed out of groups in high dudgeon due to ‘musical differences’. This usually covers a multitude of sins, most of which have very little relationship to music, but all the same, the concept is important. If you and a couple of friends club together and decide it would be fun to be in a group then you have to decide what you want from the group – as I stated earlier, you have to decide what you want the group to give you and what you are able to give to the group. I repeat this now and I shall repeat it later because it is so fundamentally important. It is because so many people have failed to consider this that so many groups have collapsed and so many people have left groups with friendships often irrevocably impaired. Here are some pertinent questions that all people who are about to join a group should ask themselves.

1)     Do you want to write and perform your own music (i.e. that written by you or members of the group), despite or regardless of whatever ridiculous fashions are currently in vogue?

2)     Do you want to write and perform music that sounds trendy and is compatible with whatever ridiculous fashions are currently in vogue?

3)     Do you want to write and perform music that adheres rigidly to a particular genre?

4)     Do you want the music of the group to evolve and change over time?

If every group member is largely in agreement with any one of these points then one of the first major problems is temporarily solved. Mind you, a common occurrence is that a group forms initially, full of vitality and enthusiasm, with everyone happy to play a given genre. Then the keyboard player discovers 1970s jazz funk and starts to misbehave. The singer and guitarist insist the group adheres rigidly to the particular brand of death metal their audience knows and loves. Before the end of the year the errant ivory tinkler has vacated his chair and an advertisement is placed in the classified section of a popular music magazine for ‘keyboard player wanted for death metal band – no time wasters’.

You may be privileged enough to be in a band that features people who express a knowledge of and interest in a variety of different musical genres. If so then you are in an extremely fortunate situation that should be exploited to its full potential. In this case you are in a position to practise your craft so that ultimately your members will possess sufficient technical skills to be able and willing to take risks and be inventive – which you should all do, frequently! In fact, I will go even further and insist that this is an essential prerequisite. It is impossible to create work of any value in a pop group unless its members are able and willing to take risks and be inventive.

In order to avoid the ‘jazz pianist in a punk band’ scenario to which I alluded earlier, let us consider the work of one of my favourite British avant garde groups. During their brief career, Five Or Six (1981-1983) played numerous concerts and released a small but important plethora of recordings, many of which were only available outside Britain. Their membership consisted of 2 erstwhile pop musicians, 2 or 3 exponents of the avant garde and a few part time members who seemed to veer towards jazz. This collection of disparate individuals should have produced – and indeed often did produce – works of considerable originality that were intriguing, vibrant and frequently quite beautiful. However, it also generated vicious arguments within the group as well as fractured pieces of music that were malformed hybrids which evidently arose from a desire to keep all the factions content. As it happened, their music fared best when they ventured into pure pop songs or pure avant garde works. When fusions are attempted, ‘problems arise, problems arise’ to quote one of their ultimately prescient ballads.

A successful fusion in music generated by a group membership that includes proponents of different genres is possible when artistic creativity is considered more important than individual ideals. In the 1960s a group called Pentangle managed to combine cool jazz and folk music in a manner that was both satisfying and convincing. An excellent sample of this is the theme song they composed to a serial called Take Three Girls in which both jazz and folk are clearly discernible yet the result is a cohesive whole. I use Pentangle as an example because they are not the kind of group whose music I actually like very much but I admire their technical skills and I have the utmost respect for their musicianship.

Consider two other ‘fusion’ groups, Isotope and IF. Both groups worked during the 1970s, both groups have names beginning with ‘I’ and both groups attempted to fuse jazz and rock music together. Isotope boasted big name players (Gary Moore and Hugh Hopper among them) whereas the members of IF were little known outside jazz circles. Isotope, despite (or maybe due to) their impressive technical skills managed to release 3 albums of intensely tedious, clinically precise and utterly boring music devoid of any emotion of passion whatsoever. IF on the other hand released 4 albums that displayed passion, humour, aggression, vitality and highly original structures. True, many of their tracks contained interminable solos that had no logical place in the works but then, this was the 1970s…after all! In other words, with Isotope the reliance on technical proficiency and instrumental prowess alone proved woefully inadequate. With IF, it was the music that was awarded top priority, even when that meant writing a simple pop song with jazz inflection resulted in a more convincing result. Yet again we have further proof, as we have seen in ELP and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, interminable displays of technical virtuosity result in empty gestures that ultimately become so many sonic doodles whose records are soon relegated to the bargain bins and charity shops.

For two final examples of fusion, both of which are successful, we turn to The Prodigy and Rammstein. Here the powerful electronic soundscapes of drum and bass are married to the raw, rampant vitality of heavy rock. Both groups utilised the fusion differently. The Prodigy add touches of heavy metal to what is primarily a dance outfit whereas Rammstein remain a heavy metal group with rave scene influences. For myself, I’d rather listen to 2 hours of Rammstein than even 2 minutes of Isotope but each to their own I suppose.

Is any musical genre racially specific? In other words, as that old adage goes, can white men play the blues? No. Some readers may have been sufficiently unfortunate to encounter a white group who try to play reggae. I choose this example because it is the most extreme case. Now, since most musicians possess voices, hands and feet and are of average height and strength, surely there is no logical reason why musicians born in, say, Denmark, should not be able to perform reggae to the same degree of proficiency as a group from Trenchtown, Jamaica. However, my experience has shown me that this is patently not the case. Silly punk bands like The Clash and The Ruts tried to play reggae numbers and they made complete fools of themselves. Perhaps their musical ineptitude was a significant factor. Yet even highly competent white musicians seem simply unable to capture the essential essence that makes U Roy and Steel Pulse sound so convincing. Soul has fared no better. One group from the 1970s, The Average White Band (whose drummer was the token black member), almost manage to sound convincing as a soul band when heard in isolation but put them next to, say Graham Central Station, Funkadelic or Parliament and they pale into insignificance.

The major attempt at cultural piracy attempted by white musicians was of course the huge rhythm and blues boom of the 1960s. As an increasing number of what were then obscure R&B records from America were imported into Britain, white musicians here were woken up and alerted to what was happening across the Atlantic Ocean – and they liked what they heard. Genuine R&B music was performed by black musicians from poor, working class origins who, being subjected to constant harassment and racial prejudice, used the music as a vehicle to express their response to the brutality of Uncle Sam. For this reason, people from similar origins here, despite being white, were able not only to sympathise but also even empathise with many of the sentiments expressed. The music of these desperately oppressed black musicians was certainly more relevant to poor, working class people in Britain than any mealy mouthed platitudes the indigenous pop charts had to offer. Despite all that, when a white group attempted to play and record R&B, the results were, at best, diluted and mediocre (The Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, The Who) or abjectly wretched (The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Small Faces).

 Far less common is cultural traffic in the reverse direction. It is rare for a group of black musicians to attempt, say punk or heavy metal. There was a black country and western singer called Charlie Rich but as I’ve never heard his music and I’m no expert on that odious genre anyway, I must refrain from comment. In general, when the attempt is made, it rarely lasts for more than year. It is the case that when black musicians venture into a musical genre primarily associated with white musicians, they are regarded for their novelty value more than the actual content of their work. There was a black punk group from New York called Pure Hell who released one 7” single and then faded into obscurity. In Britain a Pakistani quartet called Alien Culture released one 7” single although they did manage to follow this with a 6 track cassette recording of finely crafted pop songs before they also faded into obscurity. Like UNIT, they had a token white member! I was fortunate to enter into correspondence with Pervez, their singer, after the group disbanded and it came as no surprise to learn that the most virulent hostility directed toward them originated from other Pakistanis rather than fascist skinheads. This is significant – we are ostracised if we try to escape from or challenge the cultural ghetto our peer group would impose upon us.

 There was a hardcore punk group in the 1980s called Death Sentence whose membership consisted of two white skinheads on vocals and bass guitar with two African brothers on guitar and drums. I assume they made the grade among punks since their one record, a four track EP, sold a few thousand copies at the time before they, too, faded into obscurity. A more successful American group, The Bad Brains, made a name for themselves during the late 1980s with their brand of punk rock interspersed with reggae numbers. I only heard one of their albums and, to my ears, they sounded more fluent and more at ease on the reggae tracks; their forays into punk rock sounded slightly contrived and uninspired but again, since I am virtually allergic to punk rock, perhaps I am not fully qualified to comment with much authority here.

 As an aside, it is generally futile to spend too much time, energy and money on trying to resuscitate an old fashioned musical genre unless you’ve been booked to play at your grandparents 30th wedding anniversary. In other words, rock and roll and punk rock are both long dead and should be left to rot in their graves. Another frequent occurrence is that most members of a band gradually move away from a particular genre as their music evolves but there is often one stalwart soul who refuses to believe the decade will ever end and refuses to alter their style of playing. Cue for another ‘musicians wanted’ advertisement (no time wasters, please).

No Time Wasters. 

In the pages of ‘find-a-musician.com’ or, if you’re closer to a pensionable age, a publication like NME, you will see advertisements placed by bands who seek new members. Often you will encounter the phrase ‘no time wasters’. I used to believe this was a slightly ridiculous inclusion, especially since, in the case of NME, it costs money per word to advertise in it. However, even I have finally come to realise why band members find it necessary to state this injunction when searching for prospective musicians. A typical ‘time waster’ is someone who replies to the advert and who seems initially enthusiastic but – and here is the vital clue to their real identity – they first request a CD of your music so they can ‘check it out’.

 Because the society of the spectacle creates an aura around pop groups (in order to add value to the idea that products created by such entities are essential to possess if you are to be at all satisfied with your life), certain sad and insecure people seek the perceived glamour and kudos of being a pop musician without actually being a pop musician, usually because they can’t perform music themselves and cannot be bothered to learn since that’s too similar to hard work. They therefore advertise their services as musicians because they want to become acquainted with the feeling derived from having pop groups ask them to attend auditions. This is as close as such pathetic individuals will ever come to being in a pop group. The pity of this is that serious music groups have their time and energy wasted when dealing with such people since it is not always immediately apparent that they are confronted with a ‘time waster’ rather than a genuine musician who seeks a band.

 We placed an advert in B8M (a popular on-line musician search site) and found this Japanese ‘guitarist’ from Fulham. That he included Blur as one of his favourite bands should have acted as a gigantic flashing beacon warning us to steer a fast course away from him immediately but we were so desperate for band members that we ploughed full steam ahead anyway. He sent us an e-mail asking us to send him some of our music. We were reluctant to send him our works as downloads because the sound quality is always abysmal so he provided us with his home address so we could send him a CD. This was useful because usually most of these creeps are careful to avoid giving their home addresses wherever possible. We sent him a CD and he replied that he was still waiting to hear from us, that indeed the CD had not arrived at his house. Even then we were not overly suspicious, despite the danger signals that most other people would have detected (his requests for our music, liking Blur, being Japanese). So we mailed another CD to him – a different one – by registered post. After this, Luc sent him an e-mail to ask if he’d received the CD. No reply. Luc sent another e-mail to invite him to the studio to sit in on a band rehearsal at a certain date. No reply. I then sent him a rather more formal e-mail to ask him to reply to the previous two e-mails sent to him by Luc. No reply. After a further 2 months had elapsed I sent him an e-mail to urge him to send us a response by either text message, telephone call, e-mail or even old fashioned letter, out of politeness if nothing else. No reply.

 After another month, we realised, to our horror, that we had encountered our first ‘time waster’. The long, detailed and thoroughly abusive e-mail I sent to him would normally have elicited at least some kind of response, if only from a solicitor. I offered to meet him outside Hackney Town Hall at a specified date and time so I could insult his manhood and subject his body to hostilities of a pugilistic nature. If he was too much of a coward to do that then I urged him at least to send an apology to Luc for being so selfish and rude. There was plenty more (I think I only mentioned the war once) but what matters here is that we could have spent time searching for other musicians but because he seemed genuinely interested and enthusiastic initially, we committed a cardinal error – we waited to discover if he would be suitable first before we continued a search for any other musicians. Clearly this Crap Jap was little more than a thief and probably not even a guitarist – we live and learn. Had he been an Oasis fan, of course, he’d not have been a Jap, he’d have been an utterly inept musician and thick as a brick but he’d also have been honest and probably cracking good company, too.

 Remember: if a ‘musician’ replies to your advertisement and says he / she wants a CD of your music first, tell them you’ll only provide a free CD once he / she has agreed to meet the band at a given time and place. You see this Crap Jap evidently accrues a sizeable CD collection by posing as a guitarist in search of a band; he requests free CDs and free downloads first and, once these are received, no further communication ensues. By then he’s moved onto the next band. This is how these people operate. They are leeches and parasites who want something for nothing and they are quite prepared to obtain items by false pretences from groups who can ill afford to act as minor charities. Thus we learnt this valuable lesson: if they aren’t prepared to meet the group first before receiving a CD or download then they are to be avoided completely. There will never be any Japanese members in UNIT if I have anything to do with it.

 “You may well demand that your troops be treated with honour but we usually find that once any troops have been shot at once or twice, their sense of honour tends to become very flexible.”

Do You Want To Perform Concerts?

Not all groups release records. There is no shame in being a ‘live’ band only – that is to say, a group which only plays concerts and never even sees the inside of a recording studio. Certain free improvisation exponents adopt this method of music performance quite deliberately and certainly it makes sense since such music is rarely either effective or convincing when recorded in the sterility of a studio. I can confirm this from personal experience. However, the disadvantage here is that people unable to attend your concerts will miss out on what your have written and performed. Therefore, it is advisable to release at least one disc of your best pieces for the benefit of posterity so that people may enjoy your work at a later date, say, after the group has split up or died in a car crash (a popular means adopted by musicians these days who seek to avoid expensive litigation when a group is on the verge of collapse).

 Why are live performances so often complete disasters? There are 3 main factors to consider.

 1) Equipment. If you don’t possess your own amplifiers and speakers or if you do but you don’t possess your own transport (both often the case with groups who are not wealthy or who are not supported by a record company) then you will be obliged to use equipment hired in advance, provided by the venue or lent by one of the other groups on the bill who can provide such equipment. One of the advantages of playing folk music is you never need to know what a P.A. is nor do you need to know the difference between an  ‘amp-head’, a ‘cab’ and a ‘combo’. One of the disadvantages of playing folk music is it is absolutely crap and nobody in their right mind would bother wasting their time with it. Let’s be honest, even a brief chorus of ‘and a hey nonny no’ in mixed company can only lead to violence.

 If you do have your own amplifiers or you are familiar with those you may use in a regular rehearsal studio then as soon as step on the stage to sound-check, you find you are faced with gear that was made on Saturn and you need to ask the owner how it all works except he’s in the ladies toilet with the barmaid making babies so you set all the controls due north and hope for the best. Some people are not confused or bewildered by amplifiers, speakers, public address systems and mixing desks. These people are therefore extremely fortunate, technically competent and probably reveal a fair degree of intelligence but since no normal, decent, sane human being can possibly feel convivial toward such abstract electronic devices, I suspect they, too, are from Saturn.

 2) Venue. It is an understandable but erroneous belief that playing in a youth club in front of 50 people is liable to be a far less prestigious event than performing at the Reading Rock Festival supporting Manowar. Besides the fact that if you are not performing with Manowar then you are far less likely to go deaf, there is an intimacy and immediacy linked with small clubs and private venues that is completely impossible when performing in huge commercial premises. We played at Ocean on Mare Street in Hackney when it was, for a brief period in the late 1990s, a trendy and much respected venue. What an utterly miserable affair! The equipment was made by Cybermen, the headline band were a bunch of upper class poufs and the audience was culled from shoe-gazers anonymous. Apparently we sounded impressive – so what? Rarely have I been so utterly bored. We also played live in Hackney Chinese Youth Club in front of 17 people and an Alsatian  dog with practise amps and only two thirds of a drum kit. That event I can clearly remember because it was exciting and vibrant.

 In any case, personal preference aside, it is imperative that each group member can hear what’s going on. In a large hall it is useful if the equipment includes monitors. These are small speakers placed at the front of the stage that point toward the group. The performers can hear a basic mix of the whole group and therefore any vital cue points necessary to signal changes in tempo, key or time signature are less likely to be missed. In the absence of monitors it is always, but ALWAYS, important to remember that the louder everything is turned up, the less you’ll be able to hear what is actually being played. Power and force is derived from your playing ability and from the actual sound you make (bass, middle, treble and presence settings on amplifiers, the kind of drum skins used, keyboard settings etc), not sheer volume.

 The choice of venue is important in another manner. You are in a group called Dinky Winky which plays reggae influenced indie rock, your bass player is Bangladeshi and your singer is as gay as a carnival. As a result of a last minute cancellation by The Creeping Nobodies, you’ve been offered the chance to perform in their place, supporting The Hammer Of Thor at The Old Rottweiler in Dartford. One of your fans informs you that’s the place next to the railway bridge where the motorcycles are always parked, you know, the place that’s recently been re-opened after that poor sod was hacked to death with a machete last year. Do you really want to play this concert?

 3) Personnel. Many of our live performances have been rubbish because I loathe playing in front of crowds of people. I cannot remember lyrics – ever – and believe me, I’ve tried but I have a defective memory and there’s nothing I can do about that - so I need them printed on lyric sheets in a large font on a music stand in front of me. Generally I stand behind an amplifier, a screen or one of the other players. So much for stage presence, then. If you have a singer who believes it is essential to leap and cavort across the stage then dive into the audience then you’re going to make an immediate impression, probably favourable. However, if you have a guitarist, bass guitarist or saxophonist who also seeks to behave in this manner then you’re not going to make a favourable impression, you’re simply going to make a bloody awful racket. Stage antics can be amusing and highly entertaining but only so long as they never impair the quality of the music being performed. After all, if we really want to watch leaps, bounds and pirouettes then we’ll go and watch the Royal Ballet Company do it properly.

 I rarely attend concerts of any kind. Classical music concerts in Britain are performed by middle class snobs for middle class snobs and that’s all. Sorry, chaps, but that’s the long and the short of it. If I want to be surrounded by wealthy rat-bags I’ll go to (for instance) the Henley Regatta, not because the music’s better (it isn’t) but because at least there I can call on fellow class warriors to trash the toffs and we can all have a party. Pop concerts would be tolerable if there were any decent groups in Britain worth watching (apart from UNIT) but there aren’t. Jazz gigs are the only live music events that interest me. The trouble there is that since war criminal Tony Blair became prime minister of Egoland and the rest of the Brutish Isles in 1997, he and his wretched band of nannies have made impromptu live music performances illegal unless the venues are prepared to pay exorbitant and highly extortionate taxes to the government. They have made smoking inside any building illegal (which is itself an illegal law) and have thus outlawed a significant segment of working class culture.

 As a brief digression, note that the only aspect of working class culture these filthy socialists have not made illegal – in fact have even encouraged – is gambling via the lottery. This is because there’s a hell of a lot of money to be made when you offer poor people the opportunity to ‘get rich quick’ with the promise of easy wealth. Well, I have done the mathematics and I have calculated – correctly – that if you purchase a national lottery ticket then you have more chance of being hit on the head by an aeroplane or a meteorite than winning any money. In fact, to make your odds of winning equal to being hit on the head by an aeroplane or a meteorite, you would need to buy over 900,000 lottery tickets at any one time – but then if you had £900,000 to spend on that many lottery tickets, you wouldn’t need to buy the wretched things anyway. These disgusting fat old grey suited socialists learned a valuable lesson from the fat old grey suited Tories who ruled the roost before them: the best way to make working class people part with what little money they have is to appeal to their greed – it always works.

  Do You Want To Make Professional Recordings?

 If the trials and tribulations of live concerts become unbearable then the comfort and privacy of recording studios may well seem to provide a welcome alternative. However, let us be brutally honest from the start: recording studios are always very expensive and usually beyond the financial means of most ordinary people. By ‘ordinary people’ I refer to everyone who isn’t blessed with extremely wealthy parents or who have access to indulgent advances provided by record companies.

This is not usually to imply that recording studio personnel are themselves inordinately avaricious. For example, a fee of £200 a day to use a 24 track studio may sound extortionate but let’s look at this properly. Let us assume you are using a private studio run by 3 people in a rented building. If you book 3 days to record and mix 3 pieces of music (which actually is likely to prove insufficient to achieve this but most people when they book a studio for the first time generally try to record too much in too short a time), you can consider £600 to be slightly outrageous but the only other studios you found were even more expensive. You can be forgiven for thinking that recording studios are run by Jews for rich kids and record company hacks.

But now let us look at the situation from the perspective of the studio engineer. He took your telephone call and was most anxious to persuade you to come in and use his studio. Why? Well, he has to pay £150 a week rent, he has to pay a monthly rental charge on a grand piano and he’s still paying a monthly instalment to the bank on the loan he took out last year to purchase a digital mixing desk and other gear. A folk duo booked his studio for 2 days in April, it’s now the start of June and unless he has some customers soon, he’ll have to start thinking seriously about taking out a second mortgage or selling some studio gear to pay the rent. Such a studio never knows when the next job is coming in – it may be a professional group who book 3 weeks to work on an album, it may be a punk band who want 3 days to record a single or his diary may be completely blank until July.

 Here we encounter the most crucial difficulty ever to afflict any group who seek to record their own music in a professional manner but who also wish to avoid the corporate music business. Expressed in its most barbaric terms, the only people able to afford to record music to the standard acceptable to any proper musician of integrity are record company executives or pop groups under contract to an orthodox record label (which amounts to the same thing). Truly independent pop groups will never be able to meet the costs necessary to record more than half a dozen tracks a year unless one or more of their members is extremely wealthy. As I have stated before and I shall reiterate here: rock and roll is the province of rich white boys (and girls provided they are young and pretty).

 So is there any solution to this problem? Not exactly – if there was then the quality of our numerous recordings would surely be higher than is presently the case. Even if a group spends a year saving its money to purchase its own recording equipment (mixing desk, effects console and so forth), how can they expect to learn how to make the best use of the equipment once they possess it? You don’t become a competent studio engineer in a few weeks. It is possible – though difficult – to record music using a computer programme such as Sibelius (although the equipment required for this can also be prohibitively expensive). Obviously there are variants of cubase but these are only designed for anoraks and geeks who want to make rave records in their bedrooms and frankly, while the 1990s were immense fun, they are gone and they are not coming back – we really should move on into the 21st century and deal with it. Work as many extra hours as you can and save your money like a Jew – that’s the option we chose.

 Beware of the short cut! Now it may have occurred to you that since expensive studio time is consumed recording all the instrumental and vocal parts of a track separately, it would be more cost effective to play the pieces live and record everything at once. Well, in theory this is quite acceptable IF each instrument and voice can be screened separately, IF the performance is of sufficient technical proficiency and IF you can obtain the optimum sound from each instrument that you require for the particular number being recorded. In practise, many groups have recorded ‘live in the studio’ and for certain forms of music this method of working has even enhanced the result. However, one should record ‘live in the studio’ only if one believes this is the best means by which to capture a performance, not simply because it saves time and costs less money.

 I used the term ‘screened separately’ above. Separation is absolutely essential in any music that has considerable concertante – when multiple voices are heard simultaneously (saxophone, keyboard and bass guitar all playing in counterpoint over a drum beat, for example) then it is a primary requirement that each instrument can be heard clearly. Studios will use booths or moveable screens which isolate each performer so that the microphone (placed so as to record the instrument or voice sound and send it to the mixing desk) will detect only what is being played by that instrument (or voice) and not any other unwanted, extraneous sound sources. If the group elects to perform a complex piece of music live then my advice is simple: don’t. Classical ensembles may do so, of course, but then these generally use purely acoustic instruments. As soon as you wheel out the amplifiers and speakers, the problems arise.

 A perennial example of a typical studio problem is the rattle on a snare drum from certain bass guitar frequencies. When everyone rocks out at fortissimo this may hardly matter – but if everyone stops except for the bass guitarist who has a brief solo before the keyboards enter, followed by the drums, then often you’ll hear that infernal rattle as the strings of the snare drum vibrate in sympathy with some (but not all) of the bass guitar notes. Using hefty screens can prevent or at least inhibit this problem. Recording the bass guitar part separately, of course, is better still.

 Vocalists and some wind players often complain about recording their parts while they wear headphones – they prefer to hear the music emanate from speakers and sing or play along to that. I know this from personal experience since I generally give a much better performance if I sing along to music blasting out of speakers. When I hear it through headphones I often find my singing is hesitant, restrained and occasionally slightly flat. For years I insisted that all my vocal parts were recorded without headphones. This gave the engineer a head ache because the microphones used for voices need to be of high quality – which also means they are much better at picking up extraneous noise – such as the backing track to which I am singing. What happens is that the vocal track (which should feature only the sound of my singing voice) picks up the sound of the band playing from the speakers. If this is minimal then it should not present a problem. However, if the singer decides to record some overdubs (this used to be called double-tracking), i.e. sing second and third vocal parts in harmony, using the same recording technique, then there will now be 3 vocal tracks but with 3 lots of background sound.

 Novice purveyors of heavy rock tend to think (and this is entirely understandable) that for a really heavy, powerful sound, the guitars (for there are always wretched guitars) need to have plenty of top edge and deep bass, the bass guitar needs to have a big, immense mushroom cloud laying sound and the drums must of course have as much atom bomb experience as possible. Each instrument sounds grand on its own. Then the group records the music and suddenly there’s an unexpected problem: despite the drummer playing all those rolls brilliantly on the floor tom and mounted toms, they can hardly be heard. The bass guitarist spent the previous week practising those F# minor arpeggio runs and they, too, can barely be discerned. The guitar chords frequently disappear, too, in amongst the muck and mire of what should have been a huge, powerful sound but instead has become a pit of mud. So what went wrong?

 If you have ever looked at a piece of music on a computer screen, such as the Sound Forge programme, you will be familiar with the wave form. However, a more useful method to imagine music visually is to treat your track as a rainbow with each of your instruments forming part of the sonic spectrum. Let us imagine your floor and mounted toms, when played as rolls, fill up the violet end of the rainbow. If you remove them and play your bass guitar now, you will see that again much of the violet region is filled. Now we remove the bass guitar. Using your guitar with the desired equalisation (i.e. bass, middle and treble frequencies set in accordance with your preference), we see that quite often that, too, enters the violet region. Certain loud cymbals possess a high, piercing sound which, in our analogy, we shall say fills out much of the red area of our rainbow. When the guitar is played we see that much of the same region of the red is also filled. What I discovered many years ago is that in order to obtain a really huge, powerful sound from the whole group, each instrument has to compromise – not by much, as it happens, but by enough adjustment of frequencies to allow the sound of each instrument to be sufficiently differentiated so each performer can be heard.

 Of course, some of these problems may be avoided by diligent attention to detail when the music is being composed. If you ask the bass player to perform his F# minor arpeggios while the drummer is playing those huge floor tom rolls then the result is generally going to be a mess – in this example, less is definitely more since the drum rolls will drown out the bass guitar part and if, at the recording stage, you increase the volume of the bass guitar part or decrease the volume of the drum part by manipulation of the mixing desk faders, the result will sound contrived and awkward. Let the drums occupy a different part of the sonic spectrum while the bass guitar plays those complex parts – paradiddles on the hi-hat (for example) will be high and crisp which will not interfere with the frequencies being used by the bass guitar at the time. I’ll not labour the point any further because you can test out all this by practise but since studio time is expensive, if I can at least save you a few wasted hours then the effort will have been worthwhile.

 Finally, I must issue a warning to people new to recording studios. Many studio engineers will be proud of their CV if they have produced a few tracks by Big Name Bands and this is perfectly understandable. However, they will also be pleased if they have managed to procure unusual or prestigious effects boxes at bargain prices and some of the more enthusiastic individuals may seek to try these devices out on any and every customer who walks through the door. Now I have a curious aversion to ‘sound effects’ intended to be added to music that has been performed by a group. If I write a rock anthem in 7/4 time that includes a contrapuntal section for 4 different melody lines played simultaneously (I tend to do this sort of thing rather often, much to the chagrin of the other group members who have to try to play it), the music is therefore sufficiently complex and interesting not to require further embellishment by reverberation, echo chambers, chorus pedals and other sonic paraphernalia. Besides, I intend the music itself to be heard in all its clarity and if we are all sufficiently capable musicians then we should not require the additional prop of studio trickery. I have been told – frequently – that this is an attitude so puritanical as to be obsessive.

 Very well then, if we assume you wish to utilise studio effects to add further lustre to your music, be aware of the injunctions that follow as I am convinced you will find them useful.

 1) Reverb Or Delay. Most vocalists and some wind players find that the addition of a small amount of reverberation (reverb) provides their musical line with extra life and presence. U-J generally adds a certain amount of reverb on his flute parts when he’s competing for attention with keyboards, bass guitar and drums in lively music that is strident and loud. However, when reverb is added to my voice (bear in mind I have a poor voice at the best of times), it simply sounds as if I’m singing in a bathroom or, if the reverb is increased, from inside a church. When delay is used, however, the result is far preferable. Delay (analogue or digital) refers to the repetition of a sound rather than the simple reverberation that occurs such as when you clap your hands inside a large empty hall. Think of ‘delay’ as ‘echo’ and you have a clearer appreciation of the difference. It is imperative here to remember what has become my golden maxim: when everyone is someone then no-one is anyone. So if you add a cathedral reverb to all 3 guitars, to the bass guitar and to the drums, what you’ll have is a massive aural fog of sonic mud that will obscure most of any details originally in your music. Reverb and delay can be most effective but usually are best used in moderation. The key word here is subtlety.

 2) Chorus. Think of a typical jazz funk piece from the mid 1970s, all big hair and mirror shades. If the bass guitar plays a melody over a hi-hat and a wah-wah pedal drenched guitar then it’s likely to have a chorus effect added. After a while this became such a trademark for bass guitarists of that era that if it is used now, that dreadful decade is immediately associated with the music no matter what you do. The chorus effect is actually quite a useful and interest sound effect but it is quite subtle and requires considerable experimentation in order to work out how best to utilise it.

 3) Flange, Phaser & Wah Wah. The wah wah pedal is the only effects box I have ever used during those rare times when I am called upon (at live concerts) to play guitar – this is because it’s the only effects pedal that you actually play. However, most of the time I dispense with such devices entirely – my usual set up is a guitar, a lead going into an amplifier and my fingers. For many years I even regarded plectrums with deep suspicion. I advise musicians who read this to be sceptical of such obsessive Puritanism. As one who has spurned effects I am hardly best qualified to offer much advice except that you should experiment with all the possible settings while you apply different kinds of playing in order to discover what each effects box can do. These effects are also available as built in sound palettes in the studio although I have found most musicians prefer to add these effects via pedals while they play live where they have more direct control over them.

 4) Fuzz & Overdrive. The sound of guitars and bass guitars can be enhanced with the judicious use of distortion pedals. While these effects are available as presets in the studio, most musicians prefer to use these effects in pedals which they can control while they are playing. If you are playing power chords or the bass guitar is playing the tonic notes simultaneously to each of your guitar chords then a fuzz box will give you that big dirty sound favoured by Nirvana and Garbage, for example. However, if you play full chords, with changes between minor and major chords and particularly if the bass guitar is playing different notes or a separate melodic line then you want an overdrive pedal with not too much distortion otherwise the end result is a muddy mess that is no use to anyone.

 Note: since I have always been a puritanical snob who has tended to observe effects boxes with an expression similar to that found on the faces of people who have discovered a canine waste deposit on the sole of their shoe, I shall leave a more detailed discussion on how best to utilise effects pedals and studio effects to my colleague who is far better qualified to address this topic.

 5) Equalisation. This refers to the manner in which the sound of a voice or instrument may be modified by alteration of its envelope – in other words, by changing the treble, middle and bass frequencies. As I stated elsewhere, if you obtain what appears to be the optimum sounds for each instrument individually, these settings may require further revision when the instruments and voices are all heard together. For example, in a piece I wrote called The Phoenix, which has an insistent, tribal drum pattern based on continual rolls on the floor tom and mounted toms, we discovered that the big powerful sound we initially used interfered with the bass guitar. When we added treble (top end) to the bass guitar, this simply made it disappear into the mix. When we added bass (bottom end) to it, the net result was a murky fog of sound. The solution we discovered was to make the drums sound slightly too thin and sharp by themselves for when they were combined with the bass guitar, guitar, keyboard and flute, the whole work became powerful and dramatic; the drums no longer sounded deficient in any respect.

 The last word on recording studios: if you have formed or joined a pop group and you plan to record your first single, be quick about it. Since the advent of cubase and home computer recording facilities, professional recording studios have been closing down almost as fast as army and navy stores. As domestic computer software becomes ever more sophisticated, it is inevitable that recording studios will suffer the same fate as steam locomotives. By 2050 there will still be the odd studio maintained by enthusiasts, just as you can find steam locomotives run by wealthy eccentrics or historical railway societies. In any case, commercial studios may still be a required for the recording of large scale classical music but for most forms of rock and pop music, such expensive means of recording will shortly become obsolete.

Is The Best (Most Expensive) Instrumentation & Equipment Always Essential?

Yes – for me in UNIT. Why? Cheap and nasty equipment will always make your music sound cheap and nasty. A Japanese guitar will always sound like a bee buzzing in a tin no matter how many hours you spend in Abbey Road Studio trying to disguise the fact. So, if you want your music to sound cheap and nasty then you will not require decent, professional equipment. If you want your music to sound powerful, clear and professional then you need instruments and related equipment designed to achieve that. Such instruments and equipment are expensive and normally beyond the means and most musicians. This is why most commercial pop music is performed by artists who are owned by the music business (who can afford to provide such instruments and equipment) or who come from extremely wealthy backgrounds. Professional rock and pop music is for rich white boys and don’t try to convince yourself it has ever been otherwise.

 Cheap and nasty equipment can be utilised for the successful creation of aesthetically convincing music but only by people who elect to work outside the corporate music business and who choose to create work that does not adhere to standard, commercial formats. Even joke groups like Led Zeppelin and Oasis would never have made such an impact had they used Japanese equipment and recorded their albums at Fred’s Pie Stall instead of Fred’s Studio. However, adventurous and exciting groups such as AMM and Faust have often used toy pianos, transistor radios and other junk as intriguing adjuncts to their sonic arsenal yet, I posit, they have only been successful in this because they are such highly proficient musicians. Besides, the nature of their music has allowed a space in which non-professional instruments may be used such that they incorporate the limitations of these devices in a creatively interesting manner.

 Well, this is rather depressing, isn’t it? It appears that unless you prostitute yourselves to some pig of a record company boss or you have wealthy parents, then you are destined forever to have whatever music you write ruined by substandard equipment. Obviously, this is the state of affairs most likely to ensue but it need not be inevitable. It does mean your band members will need to work hard and save their money to purchase instruments and gear that will do justice to the time, energy and effort devoted to your music. If all the group members are on the dole and intend to remain so then forget being in a band – it isn’t going to happen so don’t even bother to consider it – living in fantasy land is strictly for cocaine addicts.

 There is a scale related to the arts that is calibrated by the degree to which the financial requirements are prohibitive. It adopts this intriguing pattern: 1 – visual – accessible to all; 2 – aural – accessible to all but only with considerable difficulty; 3 – visual – accessible to a small minority.

 1 – visual. This refers to art (drawing, painting and sculpture). Crayons, pencils, watercolours, oil paints, paper, clay and stone are affordable to most people who earn a reasonable wage. In fact, even people on state benefits can engage with art. There is even an argument (to which I subscribe) which states that the most vital and vibrant artists able to make valuable contributions to society are those on disability living allowance. The criterion I adopt to denote a valuable contribution to society is not the ability of an artist to paint pretty pictures for the nobility. That is usually the reserve of sycophantic class traitors who seek to ingratiate themselves before wealthy patrons. Such people are scum and should be humanely destroyed. Rarely will you ever see art worth looking at in a commercial art gallery. The Tate Modern does not concern itself with art that is relevant to the working class. Indeed as soon as you mention the word ‘art’ there appear from out of the gutters that white middle class rabble of interminably tedious rat bags who spout duplicitous nonsense.

 2 – aural. This refers to musicians, both solo artists and bands, the primary social group with which our text is concerned.

 3 – visual. This refers to film makers. Anyone who tells you it is cheap and easy to make films is a liar. Such people either seek to delude themselves or else they, like the aspiring rock stars mentioned earlier, enjoy living in wonder land. This is unfortunate because films constitute the most interesting and engaging art form of them all. Here both visual and sonic elements combine in a medium that moves. The most crucial criticism I make of art is that it is static. For some people this is an advantage – they can study areas of a picture or sculpture at their leisure, in detail. Fair enough. However, I prefer music because it moves and I equate movement with life. In films, we cannot only hear the movement but we can see it. Note: I rank silent films as being of equal worth to sound films although they represent a different discipline. However, the equipment necessary to make a film that merits the attention of people outside our immediate family is so ludicrously expensive that working class film makers either don’t exist or else they have to become prostitutes to the film industry since that is the only means by which they can ever acquire the funds required to pay for the cameras, microphones, editing apparatus and other technical paraphernalia essential to produce a high quality product. Yes I, too, have seen the flickering chaos made by students with their Super 8 cine-cameras and they are generally abysmal; they are the visual analogue of all those onerous audio cassettes released in the early 1980s by teenagers in bedrooms who managed to convince themselves they were being creative and then compounded the felony by a repeated insistence on their right to self expression, as if that alone served to justify the sonic self indulgent nonsense they tried to inflict upon the rest of us.

 So, what equipment does a standard pop group need and how much does it cost? Now I am going to make an assumption here – I am going to assume you want to avoid the risks and uncertainties involved in using whatever equipment is provided by a studio when you wish to record your music and that you also seek to avoid the problems inherent in using borrowed equipment for live concerts. Reliance on the generosity of more wealthy groups can seem akin to an acceptance of charity and I can empathise completely with any groups unfortunate enough to have found themselves in this situation.

 Microphones. Any decent recording studio is going to possess microphones that are far superior to any you are likely to afford. Therefore it is a waste of money buying a microphone for studio work unless you have a specific kind of microphone you wish to use for a certain sound but this is a detailed technical matter which need not concern us here. You may want microphones for live work, especially as public address systems provided by second rate venues and public bars can often be of questionable quality. Shure still make the best microphones in the world although they do make affordable versions now. Remember that although a microphone designed to give the best optimal reproduction of a human voice will also serve for a saxophone or most other woodwind instruments, it will not be suitable for, say, brass instruments, drums or amplifiers.

 Keyboards. Here I shall concentrate on electronic keyboards for two simple reasons: practicality and price. Nobody in a normal working class pop group is going to be able to afford a grand piano or a pipe organ and I defy most groups to be able or willing cart around either of these instruments around to gigs with them. If you require the use of a decent piano for studio work then they can be hired for a reasonable fee. Some studios have grand pianos for use by customers, usually with a minor charge. Pipe organs are generally only found inside churches so are out of bounds to all intelligent people. However, there are now electronic keyboards with extremely high quality, realistic church organ samples that can emulate that grand sound with impressive fidelity.

 Electronic keyboards are the only instruments the Japs are able to produce on which it is worth spending your money. Yamaha keyboards are popular and even fairly cheap varieties can be reliable and durable if treated with care. Digital keyboards now contain dozens of preset sampled sounds plus additional sound manipulators that were not available to players of analogue synthesisers. However, many contemporary young keyboard players have developed a penchant for the old analogue sounds that they claim cannot be properly reproduced by modern digital instruments. Original analogue synthesisers may occasionally be found in shops that specialise in vintage equipment but these will either require extensive renovation or, if they are in near pristine working order, will be prohibitively expensive. I have a Wasp synthesiser from the early 1970s but it is broken and it is now impossible to find the spare parts necessary for its repair since they are no longer manufactured. The more expensive digital keyboards are touch sensitive (so genuine dynamic range is available as on a grand piano) and therefore these are preferable to the cheaper models since the volume must be adjusted manually and is therefore awkward (or simply not possible) for any work where variations in dynamic are important.

Wind Instruments. The saxophone is beyond doubt the most beautiful of all instruments and certainly the most versatile. Fortunately for aspiring wind players (who soon become perspiring wind players), the saxophone is the easiest wind instrument to learn although it takes considerable practise to develop the smooth, even tone essential to do justice to this most noble instrument. Saxophones come in 4 main sizes: soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. There are two more – sopranino and bass – but these are very rare, difficult to find except in specialist music shops and the bass saxophone in particular will be beyond the budget of all but professional players with £3,000 or more at their disposal. If you buy a saxophone made by Selmer you know at once that the instrument has been well made and will give you years of service provided you look after it.

 However, no matter what brand you buy, there will come a time when you find you have to press the keys harder in order to make notes sound clearly. This is because the leather under the keypads gradually hardens over time and eventually must be replaced. The joints that enable the keys to come into contact with the sound holes also require subtle lubrication now and then. Since you are breathing into the instrument, there will soon be an accumulation of water vapour inside the tube which must be expelled and the inside of the tube and bell must be cleaned with a brush after each occasion the instrument has been used. These examples of care apply to all wind instruments, of course: clarinets, flutes, oboes and bassoons.

 The clarinet is available in Eb, Bb and bass varieties. The clarinet, like the saxophone, has a single reed that must be replaced regularly since even slight cracks or chips in the reed will result in a rapid deterioration in sound quality. The common Bb clarinet is the most popular variant and while it is a little more difficult to master than the saxophone, it’s wide range of tones and general versatility have made it popular among jazz musicians although unfortunately it is rare in rock and pop groups.

 The flute comes in 3 main sizes – piccolo, flute and alto flute. The word ‘alto’ is misleading because it is actually a larger instrument with lower range than the common flute. It is also very expensive! There does exist such an instrument as a bass flute that looks rather like a bass clarinet or double bassoon but these are very hard to find except in specialist shops and are prohibitively expensive. The flute is made primarily of metal (despite being classed as a member of the woodwind family) and is the only wind instrument that does not use a reed. Because the player must obtain the sounds by blowing across (rather than directly into) the tube, this is decidedly not an easy instrument to play until this difficult technique is mastered. However, it does possess one interesting facility: the system of keys used is almost (but not quite) identical to that found on the saxophone which is partly why sax players in jazz groups often ‘double up’ on flutes or vice versa.

 The oboe uses 2 joined reeds and is known as a double reed instrument. This plaintive toned instrument can sound haunting and pastoral but is difficult to learn, requires years of practise and is always expensive (there is no such thing as a cheap oboe) so is hardly ever found in rock and pop groups. Indeed it is rare to find it in any form of popular music at all, even jazz. There is a deeper toned instrument with a lower range called the cor anglais. This is incorrectly known as the English Horn but it is neither English nor is it a horn. The name is actually derived from the French term meaning ‘angled horn’. 

The bassoon is the bass instrument of the woodwind family and, in the hands and lips of a competent player, is a rich, vibrant and mellifluous voice of considerable versatility from short, fast, staccato passages to long plangent melodies. It is a double reed instrument whose tube is bent back on itself (otherwise it would be twice as high as most performers of average height. All I have said of the oboe applies to the bassoon only more so! The cost alone prohibits its inclusion in rock and pop groups although there was a brief period during the 1970s when not 1 but 2 groups used bassoons regularly, Gryphon and Henry Cow. There is a bass variety, the contrabassoon or double bassoon, which is magnificent but, sadly, it is totally beyond the means of all but the most dedicated of musicians who have plenty of money to spend.

 Brass Instruments. The trumpet, the trombone, the horn and the tuba are not generally associated with rock and pop groups although there are exceptions. Trumpets can occasionally be found in jazz groups and of course ska and reggae outfits tend to favour them in tandem with saxophones. The horn is the most difficult of all brass instruments to learn and play which is why it is rarely found outside classical ensembles. Progressive rock group Egg occasionally featured the horn but only for brief moments as it was the second instrument of the bass guitarist. In our own time there is one group, Soaza, who feature the horn as one of the primary instruments (together with a female singer, bass guitar and two drum kits) and their sound is a curious amalgam of rock, pop and (almost) avant garde.

Guitars. I have found that the more gimmicks and extraneous devices are found tacked onto a guitar, the more likely it is to be a contraption designed to be avoided at all costs. The quality of a guitar depends upon the kind of wood used in the body and neck and how well the body and neck are connected. Hand tooled machine heads are also preferable. You will not be able to buy a new decent electric guitar for less than £500 and even then you are limited – the sustain, for example, will be poor without the addition of an overdrive pedal. If you want that Oasis sound or if you want a guitar that is going to last more than a decade, then you’re talking £1,200 upwards. Acoustic guitars, you would think, should be cheaper. Well, they certainly can be cheaper – but again, if you spend anything under £100 for an acoustic guitar then you’re wasting your money because the instrument won’t last more than a couple of years before the neck begins to warp and the sound will be rubbish anyway.

 You may already have heard of certain famous manufacturers of guitars: Martin and Zemaitis for acoustic guitars, Gibson, Fender and Ibanez for electric guitars. However, be warned: Japanese companies produce what are advertised as ‘Gibson copies’ and ‘Fender copies’. These firms should be prosecuted under the trade descriptions act since the instruments they make bear no genuine relation to the brand names they so wilfully pillage. The best guitars have always been made in Spain (acoustic) and America (electric).

 Bass Guitars. These instruments are always more expensive because the strings are large and the tension from the machine heads to the bridge and body is therefore greater. Thus the guitars require a more robust design. Also, because they are generally less popular (that is, fewer people purchase bass guitars compared to their ‘treble’ electric and acoustic variety), the price is increased so companies who manufacture them can still make a profit. Fender, Rickenbacker and Ibanez are three examples of famous brands and these are made in a range of styles but you need not even consider any instrument under £600 unless you gain some bizarre kind of enjoyment from wasting money. Again, avoid Japanese copies of famous brand names. 

As with electric guitars, the best bass guitars have always been made in America. However, note I have not qualified the kind of bass guitar – I have assumed you realised I meant ‘electric’ since acoustic bass guitars are not at all common and indeed this is partly because they are very difficult to play well although they have an excellent sound once you have mastered the fingering and fretting, especially when in concert with acoustic guitars and quieter wind instruments.

 Drum Kits. A cheap and nasty drum kit will have a cheap and nasty sound – there is no solution to this unless you use a drum machine. If you have paid £400 for a Woolworths special, manufactured by poorly paid slave labour in Taiwan, no amount of studio trickery will disguise the fact that you are playing a heap of crap. To buy a decent drum kit of any description you must be prepared to spend at least £1,000 and you want one made by a reputable company such as Pearl, Premier or Ludwig. Ziljian and Paiste make cymbals on which you always rely.

 Amplifiers. Here I shall defer to Scruff since he has far more knowledge and experience in this subject than do I. Even after all the years I have performed and recorded music, amplifiers and speaker cabinets still remain a mystery to me. This is only partly because I prefer the sound of purely acoustic instruments, despite my probably unhealthy affection for heavy metal which I diagnose as a symptom of approaching senility since it is only in the last 3 years that this strange affliction has developed. I have never been able to understand how people obtain really powerful, clear guitar and bass guitar sounds with amplifiers and speakers – when ever I plug into these horrible black boxes, the noise that emanates is generally like some creature with a terminal and very painful illness. This is only partially due to my technical ineptitude for when another band member twiddles with the knobs and switches, the sound improves drastically and yet I am never able to comprehend what they did and why. Scruff will no doubt reveal these secrets in his text.

 Sundries (Sticks, Leads, Plectrums & Reeds). It is essential always to have more drum sticks, leads, plectrums and reeds than you actually need – this is because, be it in a studio or on a concert stage, you inevitably find you do need them after all. Spare strings are essential because they will break, no matter how carefully you look after your instrument. Small items like plectrums and saxophone reeds must always be kept in boxes where they are less liable to be lost or mislaid. Once again, those Moshi Moshi Nippon strings may have a fetching design on the packet but they will be rubbish – go for Ernie Ball strings or a similar reputable American brand. For saxophonists, Rico reeds are simply the best, regardless of which size sax you play and regardless of which reed thickness you use. Again, these must always be kept in protective boxes or plastic wallets until they are required.

 Is Technical Proficiency Always Essential?

Yes – for me in UNIT. Why? Because it is inconceivable that you will be able to realise your ideas and conceptions or satisfy your artistic desires if you are barely able to play more than 7 notes on a saxophone or master a rudimentary form of bar chord on a guitar. This is why most commercial rock music is performed by idiots. In order to perfect their technique, musicians must practise and rehearse regularly for many hours each day. This means they have little time available to them for the study of anything else nor are they able to reserve much time to meet with other people and develop a proper social life outside music. The best musicians go to a music school to be classically trained which means they have parents who can afford to pay for them to attend such establishments. Professional rock and pop music is for rich white boys and don’t kid yourself it has ever been otherwise.

 Seriously, if you can practise your instrument or your singing for at least 1 hour each day then not only are you less likely to turn into a tedious little geek, but you are more likely to develop a level of competence commensurate with your desire to perform finely crafted music to an appreciative audience. You see, technical proficiency really is necessary for the benefit of your audience. You may have seen elderly old reprobates gabble on about how impressed they were the first time they saw The Sex Pistols play – but that’s usually because they realised The Sex Pistols were so dreadful and wretched that if they themselves formed their own band, it would just have to be an improvement on the hopeless racket made by that bunch of punk idiots. If you expect people to queue up in boiling heat or pouring rain and pay hard earned money to see you perform and if you expect these same people to purchase discs of your recorded performances then, out of respect for them, the least you can do is spend time practising, learn to play properly and then always give the best performances possible. If I call a plumber to fix my leaking sink I expect him to do a decent, efficient job – I don’t award marks for ineptitude simply because he does the job badly in an artistically interesting manner. If I see a group perform a concert and it seems obvious they are technically inept, there are 3 common reasons for this, each of which will elicit a different response from me.

 1      If the group are plagued by power cuts, by equipment failure, by an audience who are clearly escapees from an institution and who have just lost their bass guitarist to a heavy metal group and the replacement, brought in at short notice, thinks Spinal Tap are role models then they can be forgiven if their set is less than polished. In such circumstances I will make allowances should they render somewhat chaotic performances of their music.

 2      If the group are playing to the very best of their ability, trying really hard but, sadly, are simply not very good technically, again I can accept what they play because they are performing to the very best of their limited abilities and genuinely strive to achieve whatever level of excellence is within their range for the benefit of the audience.

 3      If the group are technically accomplished musicians but offer us flawed, error ridden performances because they haven’t rehearsed properly or, worse still, they can’t be bothered to play to their highest ability, maybe because they think the audience isn’t important enough or their latest album hasn’t reached a high enough chart placing then my reaction is nothing short of homicidal. Such an attitude from a group to their audience deserves violence – lots of it.

 What are we to make of these groups (certain punk bands come to mind) who claim ‘we can’t play properly and we don’t care, take us or leave us’? Well, my immediate response is to do just that – leave them! However, one can at least admire their honesty. However, there is nothing clever or laudable in being inept. Some groups include not just technically inept musicians but people who can’t actually claim to be musicians at all as part of a deliberate artistic policy. This can generate music of interest but this is usually only the case when 2 or more group members are highly competent musicians who know how to utilise the limitations of others in an artistically interesting manner. There was one group in the late 1970s called Throbbing Gristle who could justifiably claim that all 4 members of their quartet were musically inept and yet they managed to release 5 albums and 4 singles, most of which contained music that was both interesting and inventive. However, groups such as this are the exception rather than the rule and they still worked hard at their craft, devoting many hours a day to making the most of their limitations, to discover what they could do and how to utilise their limitations in a manner that created music worthy of attention.

 My own opinion, for what it is worth, is largely unequivocal: if you can’t be bothered to learn to play your instrument or sing to any reasonable degree of competence then you have no right to perform in front of a paying audience. For me this is a difficult proposition because I admit I am still, after all these years, a woefully inept musician. I can’t play any instrument properly and my singing voice, as Ben Watson once accurately observed, is abysmal. Now, I can, if I choose, offer as mitigation the fact that I suffer quite severely from dispraxia. In theory I should not be able to play any instrument at all nor expect to achieve any prowess in any form of sport that involves any degree of hand to eye co-ordination. However, is it reasonable to ask an audience at a concert or who listen to our recordings to sit through an hour of the sonic disasters that always ensue whenever I pick up any instrument? While I can sing in tune and in time, I do have a truly wretched voice that simply isn’t pleasant to hear – in fact it sounds very much like a homosexual crow with a head cold – about that I can do nothing at all since the voice I have is what nature gave me.

 That I have finally, after many years of struggle and practise, managed to play the guitar, bass guitar and drums at all is a quite amazing achievement since it should, in theory, not ever have been possible. So you see it is because I have discovered what can be achieved through diligent attention to hard work and practise that I value technical competence. When I hear a band of able bodied people play music in such a way that I know I could also play what they play only to a better level of competence, I make no apology for my utter contempt and derision.

Royalties & Ownership.

There is another factor to consider for all groups who compose their own material (as all serious groups should, of course). In the unlikely event your group ever secures a contract with a record company, your music will automatically be published either by the record company itself or by a publisher they recommend. In either case, you can be certain it will be for the benefit of the record company, not your group. You may prefer to choose a publisher yourselves but this is actually very difficult since publishers are in the business to make money and will therefore be reluctant to bother with an unknown young group, unless they are supported by record company of some repute. By ‘some repute’ I mean, naturally, a record company who have proved themselves to be utterly callous capitalist bastards since these are the kinds of companies accountants, insurance firms and publishers respect.

 Let us assume your singer and bass guitarist write a pop song that the company decides has commercial potential. They release it as the ‘a’ side of a single (even though compact discs only have one playable side, the old fashioned terminology has remained with the industry and will probably continue to do so). Your keyboard player wrote that fancy little bridge passage, you know, the arpeggio that modulates from F# minor back into C major to lead into a return of the verse after the saxophone break. At the time, he didn’t bother to demand any credit because, after all, the basic song was by the singer and bass guitarist. The ‘b’ side is an instrumental by the drummer that nobody will listen to even though it’s far superior in every respect to the bland pop pap destined for radio play. Anyway, maybe the single starts to sell in sufficient quantities for there to be a significant financial return such that even the group members receive a small share of the profits. Now comes the awkward part. Since the song is credited to the singer and bass guitarist, the cheques are made payable to those two people. All future royalties from radio play will also go to those two band members. Now at this point the keyboard player understandably requests at least a small reward for his solution to the F# minor problem that perplexed the main song writers. Cue ‘the band row’.

 One solution is to credit all 5 band members with writing credits – with that formula each member will receive an equal share of any profits the group is fortunate enough to accrue. Well that’s wonderful, darling, but then the keyboard player draws attention to the fact that not only were nearly all the songs written by the singer, bass guitarist and keyboard player but also apart from that nifty little instrumental ‘b’ side on the first single, the drummer never contributed a single musical idea to either of the two albums or the next three singles yet he receives one fifth share of the profits. Cue ‘another band row’.

 In UNIT we credit every contributor to a track. So, if Luc suggested a key change in the middle of a piece of music that otherwise was written by UJ then they will both be credited. If I have not contributed to the work in question then I receive no credit. The same applies to the texts. Any contribution, regardless of quantity, is credited if it is used in the finished work. However, in our case this is purely academic since we are banned from being mentioned by the music press and will never be allowed to appear on television, national radio or be signed to a record company. Personally this is to our advantage, but the method we have adopted is at least honest and fair if only partly misleading – for example, on some of the early UNIT works, Achoi was often credited with writing music together with myself or CK when, in fact, he contributed very little at all – not through laziness but through musical inexperience. However, his energy and enthusiasm compensated adequately for this so it seemed only fair to give him a musical credit whenever possible.

Your Sonic CV.

 Back in the 1970s, if a group were able to release a record (usually a 7” single), this was taken to parties, hawked to local radio stations and sold at concerts. It was their aural calling card, an advertisement of what the group were all about. There was an aura of wonder, of mystery, connected with your voice or instrument being captured on a circular piece of black plastic. In our more sophisticated age we can appreciate now how utterly absurd was this attitude, especially since records always sounded dreadful! Until the audio cassette was invented, phonograph records were the only practical means by which commercial recordings of music could be disseminated to the public. Records were extremely expensive to manufacture. As a consequence, if your group released a record then it was usually because a record company had paid for it and that implied you were sufficiently important to be regarded with respect by your peers. In reality, the record company may well have realised your group was crap and only released that one record as a tax loss. This attitude of reverence for the record was unhealthy and even dangerous for it promoted the idea that only special human beings, the chosen few, were able to release records and that record companies (and by implication the rest of the music industry) were the sole arbiters of artistic validity. We know now, of course, that this is absolutely not the case; on the contrary, record companies are rarely interested in music at all. It is their job to be interested in marketable images, fashions and trends, not music.

 The 1980s witnessed the advent of the cassette pet. Cheap portable cassette players and recorders were made available and as the brief flourish of middle class art school angst known as punk rock began, mercifully, to fade back into the gutter where it belonged, we were left with one of the very few useful legacies it bequeathed to us: the notion that anyone could form a band and record their music. In practise what this meant was that hundreds of people made abysmal noises in their suburban bedrooms, recorded these onto their audio cassettes and then posted them to their friends. In the period from 1980 and 1985, the home recorded cassette reigned supreme. The trouble is, very few of these ever contained any music worthy of our attention – 90% of it was utter drivel, the kind of sonic piffle that just might have been of interest, during a brief moment of hallucinogenic psychosis, to a particularly drug addled freak in 1967. That audio cassettes sounded just as atrocious as phonograph records did not help matters, of course.

 1985 was an important year for me. All the daft ‘doom and gloom’ merchants could no longer drone onerously on about the end of the world in 1984. (Besides, these idiots were irritatingly ignorant of the fact that George Orwell in any case originally called his tedious little novel ‘1948’.) Punk rock finally died completely. Boris Becker won Wimbledon. Ice T released his first album. Class War hit the big time and was being taken seriously by parliament and the media. It was also the year I first heard a recording of music on a compact disc: the 5th Symphony of Dimitri Shostakovich. I am not a fan of this composer and his symphonies (apart from the 2nd) are generally abysmal. However, what impressed me immediately was the slow movement – the sound quality was incredible and during those pianissimo string passages, there was no other extraneous sound – the disgusting crackle and hiss of vinyl as the stylus scratches its merry way along the groove, that horrid experience was suddenly relegated to the dustbin of history where it so rightly belonged. By the end of the decade, I did not possess a single record: I had gone digital.

 Phonograph Records

 1)     They are large, cumbersome and heavy.

2)     They are easily damaged and virtually impossible to repair once damaged.

3)     They are noisy and not suitable for quiet pieces of music. Besides, the sound quality is generally poor.

4)     They permit a maximum of 5 minutes per side of a 7” single or 20 minutes per side of a 12” album before the sound reproduction suffers a significant decrease in quality. This also inhibits the faithful reproduction of extended pieces of music so that, for example, the 9th Symphony of Robert Simpson, which plays for 47 minutes without a break, could not be issued on a phonograph record without some kind of fade out or contrived break somewhere in the middle.

5)     They are expensive to manufacture and only special factories called pressing plants possess the equipment necessary to produce them. This prohibits all but extremely wealthy individuals from releasing their own records. Records are therefore bourgeois. 

Compact Discs

 1)     They are small, neat and light.

2)     They are durable and while significant damage is not easy to repair, the contents can usually be transferred onto computer where they can be recorded onto a replacement disc at minimal cost.

3)     They are silent and suitable for all kinds of music. The sound quality is generally excellent.

4)     They permit a maximum of 79 minutes per disc which is sufficient for most forms of music.

5)     They are cheap to produce and equipment now exists which enables individuals to make multiple copies of their own music. This means that everyone can release their own music without recourse to a third party, i.e. a pressing plant. CDs are therefore proletarian.

 In most civilised countries, old fashioned phonograph records have long been obsolete. In Britain, however, there is a movement to maintain the production and sale of these ridiculous items. This bizarre trend was instigated primarily by latter day punks who, unable to tolerate the fact that the 1980s are gone and not coming back, unable to admit that their daft fashion died in 1985, have sought to encapsulate their desire to arrest the flow of time by releasing new music (well, punk rock, which is actually neither new nor music) on a format that has long been superseded by vastly superior technology. Punks always were notoriously conservative (when punks talk about music or politics, they sound just like my dad) and this latest expression of their desire to keep us stuck in the 20th century is actually rather offensive since the production of vinyl requires a further totally unnecessary depletion of oil supplies to make the records themselves plus an equally gratuitous waste of trees for the cardboard and paper used in the covers and sleeves. If you have any respect for your integrity, if you have any respect for your audience and if you have any respect for the planet and its natural resources (which are finite and in danger of depletion) then don’t release your music on vinyl phonograph records – come on, get with the century!

 After all this, it might seem logical to expect that I would urge you to release your music on compact discs. If I was typing this in 1988 I would certainly urge pop groups who wished to release recordings of their music to issue them in this format. Actually, as far as I am concerned, even CDs are now obsolete. Much to my chagrin, UNIT continue to release ‘albums’, that is to say 75 minute collections of music on a compact disc, with a booklet, housed in a plastic jewel case. This is so 1990s! My colleagues, who are both in their early twenties, take a perverse (but rather cute) delight in handling each new album as we receive boxed copies of it from the CD pressing plant. Far be it for me to wantonly wreck their fun but our much vaunted literature concerning ecology becomes so much empty rhetoric unless we practise what we preach.

 Do we need to clutter up the world with even more plastic? We do not. The technology now exists to enable us to make all our art, literature and music available to everyone and, here is the real beauty of it, the cost is negligible not only to ourselves but also to the recipients of our music, the audience. I refer of course to the Internet and the ability to render music as digital files that may be uploaded by ourselves as often as we choose and downloaded by the public at their leisure. We can still release ‘albums’ – we can arrange for the tracks to be listed in the order we select and accompany these with all the artwork and literature that would previously have appeared in the CD booklet only now we are not limited to 8 or 12 pages. Besides, the public can chose to listen to the tracks in their own preferred order and, best of all, they can reject any tracks that don’t make the grade. You must surely realise by now what is really so superb about this state of affairs? It is that RECORD COMPANIES ARE FINALLY OBSOLETE!

 Now let us revise that itemised comparison list.

 Compact Discs

1)     They must be manufactured by a glass mastering plant if they are to be of professional standard which means a minimum of 500 per order.

2)     They must be posted to people who have purchased them and these people in turn must first have sent you cash, cheques or postal orders, or worse still, use a disgusting concern such as paypal or credit cards.

3)     They incur prohibitive postage costs for overseas customers and you can suffer frequent damage or loss when packages are posted to certain countries.

4)     They are static – the contents (music and printed matter) cannot be altered by the recipient unless he wishes to take a felt tip pen and draw moustaches on Luc and U-J which, admittedly, can be fun.

5)     They employ plastic and paper and therefore constitute hazards to the ecology.

6)     They cost money for the group to produce and therefore they must cost money for the customer to purchase in order for the group to recoup its financial expenditure.

Internet Downloads

1)     Once you have recorded your music, your only initial expense is a computer with an Internet connection that services broadband or an equivalent format that can handle high quality reproduction of sound files.

2)     Nothing needs to be posted anywhere – sod the post office – when you go digital, you go free!

3)     Since you are not posting packages anywhere, there is nothing that can suffer damage or breakage. On the rare occasions when a file is corrupted or a computer crashes, you simply repair the damage and send the files again.

4)     The contents may be modified by the recipient – the track listing can be changed and sections of the artwork may be omitted.

5)     No plastic or paper are required and therefore this form of music dissemination is ecologically sound.

6)     Since Internet files cost virtually nothing to produce (other than the annual Internet service charge), the customer need not pay anything for the music. This means that the creative products of musicians no longer constitute a commodity and thus capitalist relations are removed from artistic endeavours.

 If you are in a music group and you take yourselves, your group and your music at all seriously, then the only viable means of disseminating your work must be via Internet downloads. Releasing your music on records is simply wretched and releasing your music on compact discs is so 1990s – come on, get with the century, chaps. Now, one of the few cogent arguments used by the old fashioned luddites who yearn for vinyl is that with records the artwork and packaging can always be more impressive and beautiful. Actually, I have a degree of sympathy for this notion. In the halcyon era of progressive rock (1969-1975), some of the most interesting, original and glorious artwork created in Britain was to be found on record sleeves – not just on the front cover but throughout the whole package. Artists like Roger Dean and Joe Petagno and graphic design groups such as Hypgnosis (for which erstwhile Throbbing Gristle member Peter Christopherson worked) provided the nation with images that soon became iconic. Most people are familiar with the prism and coloured light rays against a black background that housed a record called Dark Side Of The Moon, a thoroughly miserable and otherwise unremarkable album by The Pink Floyd. There is not one iota of justification for the fame of the album and what credit exists is due to the studio engineers rather than the band, all of whom were somewhat inept musicians even at their best.

 The most intriguing and attractive album covers never, ever use photographs of the band. A most useful piece of advice for all groups who wish to include artwork with their music releases (and this applies whether the album is available as Internet downloads or as old fashioned CD releases) is this: if you want people to be interested in your music and if you want to encourage curiosity in your work then avoid photographs of the band members, especially those which are obviously posed, except as additional material hidden away at the back of the booklet or as supplementary attachments to the main artwork in downloads. Remember: the only people who really want to look at photographs of the band members are your parents.

 In general, monochrome images usually make artwork look cheap and nasty, particularly since they have become indelibly associated with punk rock. If you have no skilled artist in your group, it might be worth paying someone to design your artwork – and this need not be prohibitively expensive. Most art students at college are notoriously poor and will generally jump at the chance of supplementing their meagre income by some paid work. However, do not exploit them – if you want them to do a decent job for you then you should be prepared to pay them a reasonable fee. It’ll still be much cheaper than that charged by a professional graphic designer. Besides, they’re likely to be pleased to see their work available on the web or on a nicely printed CD booklet. With this method, everyone’s a winner: the work is a useful addition to their CV and you’ll have a CD or web page that’ll look professional and attractive.

 Images to avoid – in the 1970s a wretched little band of wealthy middle class brats called Roxy Music issued their rather silly songs in record covers that used scantily clad young women draped across cars, jungles or cityscapes. This made them look sordid, cheap and nasty – so, it could be argued, they suited the contents of the albums but just because many pop groups of the 1970s managed to make complete arses of themselves is no reason for you to emulate their example. We can all learn from the mistakes made by these poor saps of the seventies. We have also found that slapping the name of the group in huge letters on the front cover tends to make your group look rather shoddy and tabloid – to be more subtle is often to be more interesting. Another error committed particularly by heavy metal bands is to list, in a tiny font size, dozens and dozens of names, generally of friends and relatives, using little epithets intended to be humorous. The result is a complete waste of text and artwork space – nobody but the actual recipients of the greeting is at all interested to read all that bollocks and it just looks ugly. If you’re going to shove a gargantuan slab of text on a page then say something useful, interesting or amusing – don’t waste it on a list of names nobody wants to read anyway.

Envy + Jealousy = Failure.

Throughout the dark ages, the middle ages and well into the baroque era, the feudal system remained a disgusting blight upon Britain. Each village contained serfs whose lives were designed to supply their lord with victuals and provisions throughout the year. The serf was obliged to pay taxes each week or month to the local lord. These were imposed upon the common people as payment for living on the land, land that had been brutally stolen by the lord or his ancestors. Originally, the land did not actually belong to anyone – it was common land available to be farmed and used by everyone. A serf was the property of the local duke, earl or squire to do with as he pleased. This lord ‘owned’ all the land upon which the serfs worked. Ownership was often hereditary – the land had been taken from the common people through force by Norman invaders. This was the most blatant example of ‘might is right’ in British history. Who could blame any serfs who were envious of their lord and jealous of his power and possessions?

 Most villages had their quotient of mental defectives, poor souls who became famous as the village idiots. They were generally tolerated provided their behaviour was never antisocial. Now let us fast forward to the 21st century and this obscene farce known as western democracy. You may believe there are few village idiots now. You would be wrong. There are still plenty of village idiots, extroverts who want to exhibit their eccentricity in public – only now they appear on celebrity television shows such as Big Brother. The dreams and aspirations of modern humanity have become so petty, timid, squalid and insignificant that now there are many working class people who envy the contestants who enter the Big Brother house and they are jealous of the celebrity status such people accrue. Who would ever have believed it possible for sane, ordinary people to be envious and jealous of village idiots?

 If you must engage in envy then envy someone important, someone who contributes to society in a heroic, glorious manner (such as Jacob Bronowski, George Steiner, Patrick Moore or Alex Jones). If you must engage in jealousy then be jealous of someone important, someone who contributes to society in a heroic, glorious manner. However, there is a much better course of action if you wish to succeed in life: never, ever be envious or jealous of anyone. This applies as much to pop groups as it does to serfs. For so long as the serf remains envious of his lord, so he remains chained to unfulfilled desire and shackled to misery. For so long as the serf remains jealous of his lord, so he remains unable to think with the clarity necessary for useful activity. When the serf replaces envy with anger, when the serf substitutes hatred for jealousy then he begins to scheme, plot and plan the violent demise of the tyrant. Anger and hatred are superb emotional states when coupled with intelligence and the will to succeed. When this noble mental state is further enhanced by the total abandonment of forgiveness, that most wretched and futile of properties, then (and only then) is the humble working class serf able to transform himself / herself into a revolutionary.

 When I was a silly, naïve but politically committed teenager in The Apostles, I was aware that because our lyrics and texts were concerned with class war and armed insurrection against the capitalist state, we were ostracised and deliberately ignored not only by the commercial media bag (which is what we expected) but also by the alternative scene with its punks and hippies, who, being white middle class social drop outs, were antagonistic toward any form of behaviour which involved hard work and the judicious use of soap. In true Stalinist fashion, we were airbrushed out of history. When the glossy fashion magazine Punk Lives featured an article all about the Zigzag squatted live music event, The Apostles were not mentioned once, not even in the tiniest size font. It was Dave Fanning (the bass guitarist and main man in The Apostles at the time) who was telephoned by Andy Palmer of Crass with a request for us to help them open up and organise the Zigzag event. Our contribution to the event was small but important. However, we were never the golden boys of the punk scene so, like Cold War, The Replaceable Heads, Alien Culture, Fallout and so many other groups whose faces didn’t fit the popular prejudices of the day, we were ignored and dismissed.

 For a mercifully brief period I was envious of some of the more famous groups whose work was recognised by the media, commercial or alternative (there was scant difference other than production values). I don’t believe I ever descended into the muck and mire of actual jealousy but I came close to it, I am ashamed to admit. However, when I met the people who produced the popular paper Class War, I received an abrupt shock – here were people with anger, hatred, intelligence and the will to succeed. They were speaking about people like me and, even more unusual, many of them were actually people like me rather than white middle class drop outs expressing their mealy mouthed platitudes on my behalf. I realised that all these other groups were irrelevant not only to me but also to the struggle of working class British people everywhere. If I expressed any grief or petulance at the manner in which The Apostles were treated by the media then its producers would gain the satisfaction of a job well done, of knowing they had succeeded. Therefore I either ignored them or, on those rare occasions when it became useful to acknowledge their existence, I wrote about them with such contempt and ridicule that they realised their efforts had been in vain – although, of course, they still achieved a partial victory because we remained completely unknown and obscure!

 In the early part of this century, I became aware of severe technical limitations in UNIT – in other words, let’s be brutally honest, some of us really weren’t very good at playing music. The two primary miscreants here were myself and Ngo Achoi. Achoi was an extremely valuable but unfortunately inept member of the group yet he had virtually no sense of rhythm and although he could read music fluently, he remained unable to play any instrument with even a moderate degree of skill. I was painfully aware of my own limitations, of course, yet I was still unwilling to blame all my ineptitude upon the dispraxia which afflicts me to this day. We could not afford decent, professional equipment so we had rat-bag guitars, rat-bag bass guitars, rat-bag drums, a toy keyboard and the flute from hell. We did not possess a single amplifier. I was briefly envious of groups who, being wealthy (either due to parental support or record company sponsorship), were able to purchase all the best equipment with which to make their abysmal racket. My irritation derived from the fact that I was aware our music was vastly superior in most respects to that churned out by most famous pop groups and yet we had to do battle with the atrocious deficiencies imposed upon us by these third rate instruments and the very limited (and insufficient) time we were able to afford in a recording studio.

 On one Thursday evening at the Chinese youth club, some of the lads were laughing and joking about Sons Of The Dragon, the first album to feature Achoi and the other Chinese boys. Their mirth was derived from a comparison they had decided to make between our album and some grotty little indie pop CD that was flavour of the month at X-FM, a rather sad little pop music station that geeks and nerds used to listen to during the 1990s. I think the band was either Franz Ferdinand or Snow Patrol but it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I realised how absurd was the source of my irritation. Did we really want to be just like one of those wretched little pop groups with their vacuous lyrics, sonic wallpaper music and dim witted interviews conducted by even more dim witted journalists? I think not!

The result of this minor revelation was that we elected to engage in arduous practise and rigorous rehearsals combined with a completely modified attitude toward our group. We elected not so much to ignore music by other groups but to cease to make any comparison with them on the grounds that such an exercise was ridiculous and futile since UNIT was not formed with the intent to emulate the latest pop fashions. As for our equipment, well, we simply took extra part time jobs and worked over-time when possible. We then realised that it would be useful and perhaps even artistically valid to modify our music such that it would capitalise on what our instruments could actually achieve rather than try to force these rat-bag items to perform tasks that were simply beyond their capabilities. Our music became even more interesting and original.

 So, let us assume you are in a pop group and you have just recorded 3 songs in a cheap recording studio as a demonstration of what you can do. Maybe you wanted the guitars to sound like Rammstein and instead they sound like so many bees in a tin. Perhaps you wanted the drums to sound like Metallica and instead they sound like The Smiths. Very well, your first task is to forget or at least ignore both Rammstein and Metallica. Do either of these groups try to sound like you? No, so why waste your time, money and mental energy even thinking about them? It is your group that matters to you, not Rammstein, Metallica or UNIT. Never mind what other groups are playing, it’s nothing to do with you. Concentrate on what you want to do and then work out how best to achieve that. Your group must succeed on its own terms and not have its creativity dictated by the fatuous bleating of people with whom you probably wouldn’t wish to spend even 20 minutes on a train carriage. Envy and jealousy are not only useless but actually dangerous emotional states: they have no place in the lives of creative people.

Don’t Be A Rat-Bag.

Throughout this text I have written in a manner that suggests I consider myself justified to act like some kind of expert. So just what provides me with the audacity to believe I am qualified to dispense advice and recommendations to all and sundry? What gives me this authority? Well, I have generally lived my life in accordance with certain cardinal rules that I have rarely broken.

 1)     Never apologise for anything. If it is necessary to say you are sorry then you have behaved like a rat-bag and therefore you should have been punished accordingly for your disreputable conduct. Had you utilised what intelligence you do possess then you would never have behaved in such a manner that it required an apology in any case.

 2)     Never forgive anyone for anything. Forgiveness is the creed of cowards. It is adopted by people too scared to take revenge and seek the retribution that is theirs by right. It allows utter rat-bags to continue to be rat-bags. If you forgive someone for being a rat-bag then they are given no incentive to discontinue being a rat-bag. However, if instead you wreak terrible revenge and heap odium upon their wretched heads then they will soon learn to start behaving like a decent human being or else, at the very least, they will go away and be insignificant somewhere else.

 3)     Never waste time and energy on regrets. So you’ve been an idiot; you’ve done something stupid. Maybe you’ve missed an opportunity that could have made you wealthy and famous. Tough – get over it and do something constructive instead. Don’t sit around the house moping like a Libertines fan – life is too valuable for that.

 If I had never broken any of these magnificent rules then I would be indeed be a superb example of humanity. Unfortunately there have been just a few rare occasions when I have failed to adhere to these rules and the quality of life for I and those around me deteriorated for a while. The major cause of these errors – indeed the foundation upon which my momentary lapses of weakness were built – can be summarised thus: I joined a music group almost on a whim. So shocked was I to be offered the opportunity to be a pop star that I didn’t stop to ask myself why I wanted to be a member of such an ensemble. Indeed it never occurred to me to think of the dire consequences of not taking a while to ask myself this pertinent question – and dire consequences there most certainly were.

 You see when I was asked if I would like to be the singer in what was initially a punk band called The Apostles, I accepted the invitation at once – a stupid and most regrettable mistake. It was not the case that it was an error to join the group – the error was that I did not stop to consider why I wanted to be in a group. Also, I did not stop to consider why 3 middle class teenagers would want a Glaswegian scum bag to complete their already dubious quartet. The danger signs were all there: they were from wealthy homes with parents who had professional jobs – I had only recently been discharged from Springfield Psychiatric Hospital after finally trying to end my life, the result of 15 years of being bullied, ridiculed and intimidated by parents who should have been forced to donate themselves to medical science since their existence served no other useful function in society, combined with 11 years of absolute hell in various schools that should have been the first targets of the Angry Brigade.

 Then there was the other glaringly obvious fact, a fact I chose to ignore at the time: they were all technically proficient musicians although they could not read music whereas while I could indeed read and write music, I possessed no musical ability at all as a performer. How I managed to convince them I could actually sing is still unknown to me – either they were truly desperate to find someone, anyone at all, or else their quality control knobs were turned down to zero the day they auditioned me.

 The consequences were these. It transpired that these 3 lads – Pete Bynghall, Julian Portinari and Dan MacKintyre – wanted to be in a little band for fun, something to do while they finished their college courses, a means by which to spend their time until they knuckled down to take up serious careers and leave all that silly rock and roll behind. There’s nothing wrong with that and absolutely no criticism is implied by this statement. The problem was that I, on the other hand, perceived the group as a means by which to redress all the crimes that had been perpetrated against me by parents and school. I saw this band as a way to disseminate political propaganda, a guerrilla manifesto set to music – it was to be my vocation. The result was predictable although I remained totally ignorant of it at the time. The more serious I grew, the more committed I became and the more devout was my dedication to the group. It had to be professional and totally committed to political propaganda; as far as I was concerned, having fun was an insult to the revolution. They found me increasingly tedious to tolerate and no doubt my continual aggression and almost religious devotion to discipline and duty became unbearable and probably inexplicable to these fun loving teenagers who must have wondered from what planet I came. Note: although we were approximately the same age, I pretended to be older in an effort to extort, by false pretences, additional kudos and respect. Even now I am occasionally astonished at just how disgusting I allowed my behaviour to be in order to obtain whatever I desired. In a commercial pop group this would be an asset of course. 

That I ignored certain other key factors also contributed to the first significant collapse of communication. At this time an odd anarchist group called Crass were highly popular amongst the punk subculture in Britain. They expounded a bizarre mixture of pacifist anarchism influenced by Buddhism, partly as a result of the experiences of some of their key members whose adolescence was modified by the hippy movement and the counter cultural mien that pervaded Britain during the late 1960s. Pete, Julian and Dan identified strongly with Crass and their ideals. I considered them absolutely preposterous and in any case they were utterly irrelevant to me and my life. Although I had been fascinated by avant garde classical music for many years, I had lately become interested in some of the more adventurous pop music of the period, primarily The Pop Group, Twelve Cubic Feet, Five Or Six and even Throbbing Gristle. You can appreciate that The Apostles were destined to implode / explode at any moment.

 Eventually the 3 lads called around my house in Stoke Newington one Thursday afternoon and sacked me. They were clearly nervous and ill at ease at having to take what for them must have been the only feasible course of action available to them. It was what I expected. I made no immediate fuss, despite being desperately upset. I believe I realised even then that I had probably been responsible for this. In fact, of course, I was completely to blame because it never even occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, they did not share my desire to embark upon this crusade against the evils of government interference in private lives and western democracy. As far as they were concerned, where was the fun in that?

 The Lesson: if you are offered the chance to join a pop group, find out what it is they want from you or what it is they expect from you. Make sure you know what you want from the group or what you expect from the group and make sure the others realise this. It is absolutely imperative that each band member is aware of the desires and expectations of the all the other band members – these desires and expectations may still remain unfulfilled, of course, but there will ensure far fewer arguments and fights if this basic foundation of awareness is made apparent at the earliest opportunity.

 In a fit of pique I elected to form another group, also called The Apostles. I did at least have the decency to ask the other 3 lads for their consent – to their credit, they offered no objection. Dave Fanning joined this new ensemble and he recruited 2 other lads, John Soares and Martin Smith. Soares was from India and you must appreciate that at this time, the punk scene in Britain was white, white, white, as far as the eye could see. The expression of racist sentiments was considered perfectly acceptable so naturally we were subjected to our share of abuse. Soares did his best to find an identity for himself within a scene which frankly didn’t want people like him in it. He briefly found solace in various psychedelic drugs and was offered kindness and support by the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective before he moved to America, changed his name to John Travis and is now a very successful commercial record producer. Good – that proves there is at least some justice in the world. Smith was a pretty decent drummer who later became emotionally unstable, joined the Hari Krishna cult and vanished into obscurity. He was also a jolly decent chap so I genuinely hope that where ever he is and whatever he’s doing now, he has found happiness and fulfilment.

 After barely a few months, Soares made it obvious he wanted to leave the group and move onto other projects. Any decent, well adjusted person would have accepted this and wished him well. I met up with Ian Slaughter; we took a No.30 bus to the squat in Islington where Soares lived then and, after being admitted by some drugged up punks who didn’t even ask who we were, I left Ian in the hallway while I barged into Soares’ room and I then punched him in the face – twice. In those days, a better name for The Apostles might have been Colditz or The Mafia since it was dangerous for anyone to leave. Smith avoided any such contretemps by disappearing without trace although he need not have worried since he had never actually annoyed me – which was a singularly impressive achievement for anyone in those days.

 The Lesson: if someone seeks to leave your group, don’t take it personally; people change, they adopt new interests and, if they are intelligent, they wish to expand their knowledge and experience. If they are convinced that belonging to your group will inhibit this then they must leave since the group no longer serves a useful purpose for them and the other band members must accept this. However, if you want to leave a group then you must endeavour to do so in a manner that will cause the least amount of inconvenience possible. In 2008 there was a bass guitarist of a successful heavy metal group who decided to leave the band after playing the second number of a live concert – he simply unplugged his instrument and walked off the stage in front of an audience of nearly 500 people. I suggest that this is perhaps not one of the most ideal methods one should employ if one seeks to leave a music group.

During the 1980s The Apostles released (ahem) records – now you must understand that we saved up the money we earned from our jobs and paid for the recording and pressing of these records ourselves. Not only that but we designed the covers and printed them ourselves, too, because Dave and I worked in an anarchist printing press at the time. This all sounds wonderfully wild, windswept and interesting but the fact of the matter remains that none of us had any idea exactly how records were supposed to be recorded and mixed. We were a trio at this time since Dave took on both guitar and bass guitar duties (as well as occasional vocals) and we enlisted a 14 year old drummer, Chris Low, who used to commute from Scotland to London every time we wished to play a concert or make a record. His devotion to the group was therefore beyond question. After a year we discovered another young lad, Malcolm Lewty, who must have been about 15 at the time. We invited him to join the group, too. The fact that he lived in Newcastle, was unemployed and also couldn’t actually play the guitar at the time never seemed to perturb us, for reasons known only to God. So we had to finance not only the recording and pressing of the records but offer financial assistance to our 2 new members so they could afford to come to London to provide their contributions. This meant we tended to spend as little time in the studio as possible in order to avoid spending money we could ill afford. Combine this with the total absence of even the merest conception of how bands were supposed to record music and we ended up with records that were not only abysmally performed but also atrociously recorded. The only decent aspect of the records, the drumming, was subliminal by the time we’d finished turning the faders down. This ensured that the complete ineptitude of myself, Dave and Scruff could be heard in all its grisly glory. To be fair, Dave did drastically improve over a short period of time but this was later.

The Lesson: people who work in recording studios are known as engineers. They are trained, usually with many years experience, to record groups and ensure that they obtain the best possible reproduction on tape or disc of the music they perform. We ignored any suggestions made by the engineer and decided we could do it all ourselves. This is the primary reason why every record by The Apostles is dire and sounds horrible. When people in studios and pressing plants tell you facts, learn and remember them. They know what they are talking about – obviously – or else they wouldn’t still be in business. Ignore them at your peril.

Now any normal group would have treated Chris with the respect his hard work and commitment warranted. We did things rather differently. First we ‘mixed’ the tracks such that the drums were virtually inaudible so that all the hours he spent learning the music and practising it were somewhat futile. Second I then decided to sack him (by letter) because I’d heard he had been rude to Scruff (Malcolm). Scruff himself never made any complaint to me, you understand – I heard this second hand from one of the glue sniffing punks who shared the squat in which I lived at the time. So, on the basis of heresay, I was prepared to fire the most committed and most technically competent member of the band. Chris even gave me the chance to change my mind by writing a polite and understanding letter in reply – but, no doubt determined to make sure The Apostles never achieved anything of any worth, I stubbornly refused to conceive of the possibility that I could ever be wrong – perish the thought.

The Lesson: if you are the leader of a group, remember that this does not give you carte blanche to treat people like complete cunts. If you know, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that the drummer took your pet badger and painted it bright blue before he performed anal sex with it then by all means, sack him – or make sure you have photographs and put them on You Tube, at the very least. If the milkman tells you he’s heard that the keyboard player has been making lewd and interesting biological suggestions to your girlfriend, check the facts first before taking action. If a renaissance man such as I can be in error then it is possible for anyone to be wrong.

In the 1950s, America had the raw vitality of rhythm and blues plus the best jazz to be found anywhere on the planet. All Britain could manage were skiffle bands and folk clubs, God help us. It came as no surprise therefore that if we wanted to be cool and impressive, it was better to copy what our transatlantic cousins were doing than risk making wretches of ourselves with washboards and fiddles. An obvious corollary of this was that our singers copied the mannerisms and, naturally, the accents of American vocalists. However this became a problem by the 1960s when British pop groups, inspired by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who, began to seek out their own national identity and yet the singers still adopted fake American accents with such regularity that it became the norm. Indeed, whenever an indigenous was used (such as for Lazy Sunday by The Small Faces), the song was regarded as a novelty number. Imagine if Jim Morrison (a truly abysmal singer for an equally abysmal American band called The Doors) had adopted a Geordie accent for his songs – actually, that might well have been an improvement. But seriously, that simply would never have happened because it would never have occurred to any American singer to use any accent but his or her own – and quite rightly.

In 1976 when punk rock was invented by middle class art students and fashion designers, it suddenly became acceptable for the ‘singers’ of punk bands to use their own accents. That nearly all the music was wretched is not relevant here – what matters is that here was a new honesty in popular culture (admittedly an underground culture, at least initially) in which people were encouraged to use their own voices, their own compositions and their own ideas. The clothes were not copied from America and nor was the music. Actually, this isn’t strictly accurate for some of the early British punk bands were clearly influenced by The Velvet Underground and The MC5, but in general, certainly by the end of 1977, British punk bands had established a sufficiently strong identity that they were emulated by similar outfits in mainland Europe.

In the 1980s when I was the vocalist in an eminently forgettable amateur band called The Apostles, I erroneously believed that my natural accent (a combination of BBC received pronunciation with slight Scottish burr) would not be acceptable to audiences so I adopted a painfully obvious fake London accent. My ignorance of most punk rock was such that I remained ignorant of the fact that regional dialects were now not only acceptable but also demanded by audiences – this must be one of the very few positive factors punk rock has bequeathed to the world of proletarian music. As a result, the first few years of concerts and records by The Apostles were marred by my ridiculous singing. Only in the latter years of our career did I revert to my natural accent – the improvement in my singing was immediately apparent.

The Lesson: if you are a singer in a pop group and you have a strong regional dialect, never, but never, disguise it. Honesty may not always be the best policy in daily life but in music, art and literature it is absolutely essential. If you try to adopt a different accent, most intelligent audiences will soon discern a fake and the credibility of your group will be adversely affected. How much integrity can your group possess if your singer pretends to be something he or she is not. More importantly, if you disguise your accent when you sing, that implies you are ashamed of or at least embarrassed by your natural accent. Well, 2 of the most successful groups in British popular culture, Hellbastard and Glasvegas, feature vocalists who take pride in their Geordie and Glaswegian accents respectively – and it hasn’t done them any harm.

I can still remember (despite the times I have tried to forget) this wretched music teacher at school, Callard, who informed us all that music had to include 3 properties – melody, harmony and rhythm – or else it simply was not music. Two of the greatest works I have ever written for (and which have been successfully recorded by) UNIT are Hadrian’s Wall (1996) and Come September (2007). Neither of these pieces feature melodies. There is no discernable harmony in either of them and indeed it is the complete absence of rhythm that generates much of their effectiveness. I have also written examples of pure pop songs in specific keys, often 4/4 metre with verses and choruses. I have written progressive rock works that contained elements of atonality and compound metres. I have written pieces influenced by folk song, by the blues, by jazz and even by hard core punk rock. I have often written works on which ultimately my presence as a performer was not required. All these factors account for the artistic integrity and aesthetic success of our group over the years. I mention them not to advertise or extol the perceived virtues of either myself or UNIT but to provide vital information that all people with an intention to embark upon a musical career need seriously to consider if they seek to accrue a body of work that merits attention and respect 

Throughout the 1990s in magazine interviews and in essays for my own magazine, Smile, I have tried (generally with scant success) to impress upon aspiring pop groups the necessity for originality and variation in their music and lyrics. From the 1950s right up to the present day, there have been 3 basic formulas for lyrical texts.

1)     I have managed to find a new girlfriend and actually she’s rather gear.

2)     My girlfriend has done gone and left me and frankly I am somewhat peeved.

3)     Let’s all have a party and boogie on down – yeah.

Just how many different forms can these three lyrical subjects adopt? Well, the first two had become largely obsolete and tedious by 1960 but that didn’t stop pop groups churning out the same old crap on the tedious production line, regardless of what genre the band adopted. The first bands to finally break away from this risible tedium were the progressive rock groups of the early 1970s. The third variant enjoyed particular success during the soul and disco boom of the late 1970s and celebrated a resurgence in the 1990s as a result of the rave scene but after a while I find myself compelled to scream at all exponents of these bacchanalian exhortations “all right then, go and have your bloody party and when you’ve finished, sober up, come back and write something worthy of my attention.”

Music has tended fare a little better, of course, because deficiencies in imagination can be disguised under a welter of different musical styles but after al while, the absence of originality and interest becomes evident. Even so, there are formulas that have rendered so much pop music boring and disposable.

1)     We have a verse, a chorus, a verse, a chorus, a guitar break, a verse, a chorus and another chorus unless we’re too lazy and stupid to work out how to end the song in which we simply repeat the chorus continually and gradually pull the faders down to oblivion.

2)     There are always 4 lines to a verse and 4 lines to a chorus. If we start the song with a phrase then it is repeated 4 times. If there’s a dinky little riff before the chorus then we repeat that 4 times.

3)     The songs have to be in 4/4 time because not only are we morons but we assume the audience will be even more intellectually challenged.

4)     Our album will contain 12 songs. Since there are 4 people in our group then every song must feature all 4 of them on every song, even if one of them doesn’t actually need words and another one doesn’t actually need drums.

5)     We decided we were a post-punk Brit-pop outfit so we spent the next 15 years playing the same genre of music until we all either died of old age or some psycho from the audience put us out of our misery with the aid of a sawn off shotgun and was consequently later awarded the OBE for services to mankind.

Oasis released their first album in 1994. This was a successful project even though it contained just 2 songs, an electric power pop effort played by the whole band and a piece of acoustic guitar valium rock drivel that omitted the bassist and drummer. They then released the same album in 1996. They repeated this in 1997. They released the same album yet again in 1999…or maybe it was 2002…or perhaps that was yet another album identical in most respects to all the others. Who was counting or even cared by then anyway? The main songwriter for the band, Noel Gallagher, claimed The Beatles as his primary influence – well, I am definitely no fan of the fab four but for crying out loud, was he not ever even dimly aware of the sheer variety and originality of that group from about 1966 onwards? The result: in the year 2200 people will still listen to The Beatles – it is extremely unlikely anyone will even remember Oasis. However, why just pick on Oasis? After all, they did write some rousing pop anthems…occasionally. There were plenty of bands who were far worse. Think of Status Quo, The Ramones and The Clash. Better still, let’s not think of them. Let’s forget them entirely – maybe with enough effort we can convince ourselves their tedious drivel never actually existed. Yes, I must say, I prefer that.

Very well then, let us assume you have your pop group and you’ve begun to write your own material with a view to releasing a CD yourselves. Here is the traditional format adopted by most vanilla pop groups.

1      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

2      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

3      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

4      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

5      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

6      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

7      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

8      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

9      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

10    Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

11    Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

12    Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

13    Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

14    Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

This format also applies to punk bands except in this case there tend to be around 20 tracks because the songs are shorter. In the pop variant, all the songs are between 3 and 4 minutes long. The album will generally be of around 50 minutes duration even though you can comfortably fit 75 minutes of music on a CD. All the tracks will generally follow the 3 lyrical variants and 5 musical rules listed earlier. Now let us look at a typical format we’d use for an album on which we feature our more conventional musical genres.

1      Rock anthem in 4/4 featuring the singer, keyboard player, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

2      Rock song in 4/4 featuring the singer, flautist, keyboard player, bassist and drummer.

3      Folk ballad in 3/4 featuring the singer, flautist and guitarist.

4      Rock instrumental in 6/8 featuring the keyboard player, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

5      Rock anthem in 4/4 and 6/8 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

6      Pop song in 4/4 featuring the singer, flautist, keyboard player, bassist and drummer.

7      Rock song in 5/4 featuring the singer, bassist and drummer.

8      Pop ballad in 4/4 and 7/4 featuring the singer, flautist, keyboard player and bassist.

9      Pop instrumental in 4/4 featuring the flautist, keyboard player, bassist and drummer.

10    Punk anthem in 4/4 featuring the singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

11    Folk anthem in 6/8 featuring the singer, flautist and keyboard player.

12    Rock anthem in 7/4 featuring the singer, flautist, keyboard player, guitarist, bassist and drummer.

Here the total duration is about 75 minutes because while some of the pieces are as little as 2 minutes long, others are 7 minutes or more. Now, be honest, doesn’t our format appear far more interesting?

In late 1982, as a result of working at the Autonomy Centre, knowing various famous anarchists and being in The Apostles, I managed to convince other fledgling bands that as I was available to offer support and assistance to them whenever they required it. I even persuaded some of them to believe I was able to play guitar in order to help them out until they found full time 6 string exponents who actually knew what they were doing. Two aspiring punk bands, Primal Chaos and Faction, were temporarily bereft of guitarists and I offered my dubious services. BBP recently released the complete collected works of The Apostles on CD together with extra discs that feature me playing with these bands. I even repeated this process with a band called Flack only this time I picked up a bass guitar and gave it the ‘nae bother, leave it to me, lads’ routine. Christ, how ever did they fall for it? What the hell was I playing at?

I should mention that it was never my intention to be a rock star or impose my ideas on their groups. I honestly wished to be of service to them and my decision to provide assistance was motivated by a genuine desire to help them out. The result was that my indie pop jangly guitar sound peppered their cassettes and altered their image considerably until they found full time musicians after which they had to work hard for a few weeks to rescue reputations sullied by my association with them. Primal Chaos rehearsed at The Crypt youth club in Covent Garden (where I first met Dave Fanning) and consisted of Peat Knight (vocals), Bill Corbett (bass guitar) and Martin Cobb (drums). It took about 40 seconds for me to realise I was out of my league when Bill started to play – I didn’t realise the bass guitar could be played in such an interesting manner. Because the band had been without a guitarist for so many months, he had developed a full, busy style of playing to compensate, to ‘fill out’ the sound and it was through watching and listening to his playing that I learnt how to write interesting music for the instrument.

Faction approached me later in the year – they were in a similar predicament. By this time I was absolutely allergic to punk rock and tried my hardest to rescue them from the muck and mire of that dreadful youth subculture. It never even occurred to me that perhaps they enjoyed punk rock and wanted to be a punk band at the time!

The terms ‘avant garde’ and ‘experimental can (and, sadly, often do) describe groups who adopt the idiomatic language of the genre because they can cheat; they do so because they aren’t sufficiently technically competent to perform conventional musical forms. In other words, such bands believe they can take a short cut to respect and recognition by cheating, by playing any old self indulgent crap and dressing up the resultant sonic doodles behind a façade of pretentious bollocks on the grounds that the aural mess is ‘avant garde’. This is a completely spurious notion because you have first to master melody, harmony and rhythm before you can then enter the higher domains, the avant garde and, the ultimate test of musicianship, free improvisation, the most difficult yet most rewarding of all abstract musical genres because it is music in its more, unadulterated form.

Resonance 104.4 FM

In 1998, a disc jockey from BBC Radio 1 called John Peel instigated the implementation of a temporary art radio station as part of a series of events held that year to promote alternative arts. The winning applicants were the London Musicians Collective, a group of musicians, artists, writers and film makers based in Camden in north London. We were aware the LMC were already in operation during the 1980s because they allowed us free use of a small hall for artistic events where we would organise live concerts with such groups as Cold War, New 7th Music, The Replaceable Heads and Twelve Cubic Feet. It would be uncharitable to remark that many members of the LMC consisted of white, middle class socialists. It would also be hardly relevant except that I shall justify this presently. Resonance were given a frequency of 103.8 FM and for about 8 months they provided London with an all too brief glimpse at what real communication with genuinely innovative and interesting radio could be. Unfortunately I was not aware of this bold, brave new experiment because I was still living out the fag end of the rave scene, may Odin have mercy on my wretched soul. In fact, I only listened to pirate radio shows where drum and bass was featured or else I consoled myself with BBC Radio 3.

In 2002, after considerable meetings, fund raising and sheer hard work, a small fanatical core of the LMC which included Knut Aufermann and Ed Baxter, managed against all odds to persuade Offcom, (a draconian and thoroughly risible gaggle of media nannies instituted to control who is given permission to broadcast radio and television programmes to the public), to allow them to re-launch Resonance on a new frequency after they had obtained premises of historical interest in Denmark Street in west London. It was Achoi who discovered Resonance late in 2004 when he was looking for another station. He encountered a broadcast by this young woman wheeling a pram around south London late at night with a saxophone. She chatted about apparently inconsequential matters, wandered into telephone boxes, read out the numbers and invited listeners to call her live on air. While she waited, she’d stop every now and then to blow a few notes from her alto sax. When Achoi told me about this at work the next day, I was immediately interested. That evening I tuned in and I heard a bulletin of Alternative Radio, an American political magazine programme founded by activist David Barsamian.

Now in order for you to appreciate just how important Resonance was and is, you need to appreciate my own situation in Britain at this time. I was in a group whose existence was known to hardly anyone in Britain. I had been involved in the underground from the avant garde art set of the 1980s (and, by accident, the punk scene), the rave scene of the 1990s and the squatting / housing co-operative movement. I had often talked about the kind of programmes I would feature if I was allowed to run my own radio station. What affected me so profoundly was how many of the programmes broadcast by Resonance were similar, occasionally even identical, to those I would have produced myself. Then there were the people featured on various shows: Stewart Home, Penny Rimbaud, Martin Wright, Fabian Thomsett, Ian Bone and others – all people I knew personally from my travails throughout the previous 2 decades. They played music by Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio, AMM, Sun Ra, Five Or Six, The Pop Group and Gentle Giant (among others); but mainly they played music I had never heard before and much of it was utterly fascinating. More important yet, they broadcast programmes that breached the barriers of conformity and offered sonic sound worlds that defied easy description. There was a healthy mix of politics, news, humour, music and weirdness that was simply glorious. All of us in UNIT have stayed loyal to the station ever since.

I mentioned the white middle class socialist membership of the LMC earlier – well, I promised I would justify this intrusion into relevance. Anyone who tunes into Resonance for a day will waste their time if they try to identify the demographic characteristics of the people behind the station – in other words, in the absence of the information I have provided, it would be impossible to establish such properties as class, race or even political affiliation because the sheer range and variety of programmes inhibits such evaluation. One week, American pantomime Nazi Boyd Rice presented a selection of 1960s pop rubbish; another week famous anarchist Ian Bone was interviewed about Class War. There was an excellent series exploring black alternative culture. Anyway, here is a small selection of the programmes that have been broadcast regularly over the years so far, with some of our least favourite shows included as well as our most loved programmes.

Taking A Life For A Walk – Caroline Kraabel, her pram and her saxophone wander around the streets of London late at night, taking telephone calls and playing snatches of sound.

Hello Goodbye – a celebration of totally do-it-yourself and independent popular music (and unpopular music) from the worlds of pop, folk, electronic and downright strange with an emphasis on live performances.

Epistaxis Time – a truly bizarre concoction of droll monologues and audio cassette adventures that defies accurate description – elastic bands and tables are favoured over traditional instruments, for example.

Far Side Radio – unusual, bizarre and fantastic music mainly from Japan but also including Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Vietnam and China.

Welcome To Mars – a series that looks at the history of science fiction on radio, television and cinema from the 1930s to the present day with reference to the culture and politics of the period.

Democracy Now – a weekly bulletin of political activism from an anarchist and socialist perspective presented by Amy Goodman with interviews and reports the capitalists would prefer us not to hear.

Red Zero Radio – live mixes and mash ups from obscure but highly professional garage, drum ‘n’ bass types with turntables, power electronics and kicking tunes.

Something Jewish – a magazine show featuring Jewish culture as represented by the arts with particular emphasis on popular music.

Framework – a weekly exploration of field recordings, everything from gas towers and factories in Germany to bird songs recorded in Epping Forest.

The Doo Wop & Rock & Roll Show – 1950s rhythm and blues, doo wop and rock and roll which we all hate but the presenter is so enthusiastic and friendly we still listen to it…sometimes.

The Gentlemen’s Club – a half hour surreal comedy – Boys Own meets Monty Python in The Fast Show’s back yard.

Untitled – a weekly exploration of the artists featured on World Serpent, a truly abysmal record label (now thankfully defunct) where all the pantomime nazis go to make tedious acoustic guitar valium neo-folk drivel and be pretentious in safety.

The OST Show – a truly dreadful 2 hour show that features absolutely horrible Radio 2 rejects from the world of cinema and television, wretched 1960s pop pap that at its best is nothing but sonic wallpaper – but at least it is presented with intelligence, verve, humour and friendliness by Johnny Trunk.

Late Lunch With Out To Lunch – this is a mixture of political diatribe, Marxist analysis and usually interesting, adventurous music presented by Ben Watson and his young daughter Iris.

Midnight Sex Talk – beyond any doubt this is the best discussion programme about every facet of sexuality ever broadcast. Never patronising, always informative and definitely recommended for schools and colleges.

20/20 Sound System – the very best in underground reggae. None of us in UNIT used to like or indeed harbour any interest at all in reggae until we started to listen to this programme.

Sporting Legends – a weekly series of potted biographies of famous personalities from a whole range of different sports, including archive news broadcasts and interview clips. This is one of my own favourites.

Hooting Yard – this is beyond doubt one of the very best programmes on Resonance: 30 minutes of truly bizarre, often humorous and occasionally disturbing prose from Frank Key.

The Ambrosia Rasputin Show – free jazz, bagpipes, plenty of saxophones, intriguing guests and superbly bizarre prose from presenter Ivor Kallin.

Little Atoms – a discussion and interview programme that explores the worlds of science, politics and philosophy from a rationalist perspective where humanism never precludes controversial ideas.

The Traditional Music Hour – genuine folk music from the 1940s to the 1970s recorded in situ in barns, fields, public bars, community halls and private homes.

Middle East Panorama – a political discussion show presented by Nadim Mahjoub on events in Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and so on.

Headroom – a two hour programme featuring the supernatural, the paranormal and the unexplained plus alternative investigations into political events, hosted by Rob Simone. This is still the programme rated No.1 by every member of UNIT, past and present!

Right then – name me one other radio station that includes this variety of programmes. So, why have I included this blatant advertisement for Resonance? There are 3 reasons.

1) It is quite simply the best radio station I have ever encountered: it serves as an eloquent example of how a radio station should be run and of what its content should consist.

2) It is the only radio station that has genuinely shocked, amused, irritated, angered, inspired, motivated, educated and entertained me consistently over the years.

3) It is the only British radio station ever to have regularly featured tracks by UNIT and take a serious interest in our work. This may sound a selfish reason for my support but consider this: since the late 1980s I have become persona non grata, a complete anathema to the media; the music press have a deliberate editorial policy not to mention either me or any group in which I am involved. We are effectively airbrushed not only from history but even from the present. Only Resonance possessed the courage to break the ban and not only feature our tracks on the airwaves but also promote our work. Therefore, if this is how they are willing to defend UNIT, the untouchables of the avant garde music scene in Britain, then many other groups, artists and writers can also expect to be treated with a similar decency and respect denied to them by the corporate media bag.

Now, if you are in a non-commercial, truly independent music group that is prepared to ignore the rules, to seek out new artistic frontiers and to break the barriers of conformity then I urge you to send samples of your work to this station – this does not guarantee any of the tracks will be played on it but at least you can be certain people will listen to it and take it seriously. If you are a film maker, artist or writer, the same conditions apply. Check it out – www.resonancefm.com and send letters, compact discs and good quality biscuits to 144 Borough High Street, London SW1.

The UNIT Discography

Preliminary Reconnaissance

1       Look Back In Hunger.          (first issued as ‘Academy 23’)   1996

2          Relationships & Kämpfbereit.         (first issued as ‘Academy 23’)   1997

3       We Are Your Gods.             1999

Andy Martin, Lawrence Burton, Nathan Coles, Dave Fanning, Peter Williams.

First Campaign: Secure Bridgehead

4       Sons Of The Dragon.                   2001

5       Fire & Ice.             2002

6       Untied & United: Volume 1.               2002

Andy Martin, Lang Kin Tung, Gieng San Man, Dave Fanning, Ngo Achoi.

Regroup, Sortie & Patrols

7       Dare To Be Different.                 2003

8       School Farm Bungalow.             2004

9       Rock In Opposition: Phase 1.                  2005

UJ Cheung, Andy Martin, Garlen Lo, Dave Fanning, Ngo Achoi.

Second Campaign: Secure Objectives

10     Rock In Opposition: Phase 2.                  2006

11     Untied & United: Volume 2.               2006

12     Rock In Opposition: Phase 3.                  2007

13     Rock In Opposition: Phase 4.                  2007

UJ Cheung, Thanh Trung Nguyen, Luc Tran, Andy Martin, Dave Fanning, Ngo Achoi.

Commando Raids

14     Class War.           2008

15     Untied & United: Volume 3.               2008

Third Campaign: Class War

16     Musik Als Nationale Waffe.                      2009

UJ Cheung, Andy Martin, Luc Tran.

These are all usually available from UNIT HQ, Box 45885, London E11 1UW.

Cheques or postal orders payable to YM Cheung please.

Friends, Relatives & Collaborators

Malcolm Lewty of Hellbastard – Ian Bone of Class War – Ngo Achoi – Wong Yin Kit – Rikki Morris –

Andy Martin © 2009.

Links:

[ Redchurch Studio ]  [ Resonance FM ]  [ Alternative Radio ]  [ What Really Happened.Com ]