Rubbish

 

I kept a diary on the road with Fish last year – this is copied from it word for word from when we were stranded in Greece for a few days with a broken down bus:

 

“…I had a dream where I was running away from something. Not just running down a street with something behind, but an epic chase across several continents always keeping a few days ahead of an unseen dark organisation of untold connections, influence and size.

 

The most enduring image I have as the last scraps of dream dissolve into the wakeful realities of day is that I came to be at sea somehow. There was an abandoned raft in the middle of a lost ocean and it was piled high with junk.

 

As I came closer I could see that the junk was all stuff that I have had and got rid of – not rubbish, but items that had my affections for a while and then been given away to charity or whatever when I have had a clear out. Old books, toys, clothes etc were all together on this aimless raft in the middle of a nowhere sea probably only being chanced upon once every 10 years or so.

 

I could rummage through the stuff and find very specific items I have not seen in reality since I was a kid. There was a knitted leprechaun doll I had as a soft toy and in this dream I turned it over in my hands noting every detail, every knit and stitch. I tried to remember when I’d thrown it away and why but couldn’t. Still can’t.

 

There were other bits and pieces – things that have been a wrench to pass on but then soon got forgotten. Somehow they had all found there way to this barge and it made me feel guilty for getting rid of them all.

 

Do they all still exist somewhere in this world; drifting pieces of plastic on a route to pollute whatever vortex draws them to it in the middle of an ocean? Or are they just there in the ocean of subconscience, bubbling to the surface due to some unnoticed daytime trigger.

 

If I still had that leprechaun I’d think about giving it to one of my friends’ new kids.

Then I’d buy them something else and keep it for myself…”

The End of Hibernation

It’s often been the way with any band I’ve been involved with to gig through the spring summer and autumn but to hole up during the darkest winter months in order to incubate, hatch and nurture a fresh crop of songs for the next year. And so at the end of the Fish tour in November last year I drew the curtains in the studio, stocked up on logs for the fire and wine for the mulling, dug out my cosiest, holiest cardie, locked the door and settled in for a few long weeks of writing, recording, experimenting and tinkering that has finally resulted in a fantastic new album, still pink and quivering from the force of its own creation.

It was hard work and an emotional time as it always is when I have to visit the dark sphere that loads of my tunes seem to emanate from and face up to my own demons. There’s probably a myth or old fable about a mirror that if you look into you see the darkest side of your own nature and are forced to confront it. Maybe then the guy wanders off into some harsh landscape and a self enforced isolation in order to deal with whatever it was he saw in the mirror. He grows a big beard and neglects his normal hygiene routine for a bit, shouts at stuff, eats a few insects, gets a little jumpy, goes a bit mad and comes back all disheveled a little older and a little weirder with a worrying rash and with more holes in his cardie. Well that’s what I’ve been doing. Sort of.

After my little foray into madness spending ages on lyrics, arrangements and recording all of my bits it was time to get the band in.

Gavin Griffiths of the Fish band and Panic Room came to stay and let fly all the thunders from all the heavens on his drums.
Paddy Berry from The Evernauts and Hazzard County, the hardest working bass player in the North and long suffering collaborator sunk to new depths of tone as he wrapped his greasy bass all around Gav’s beats. Filthy.
Anne-Marie Helder of Mostly Autumn and Panic Room spent a week locked in a cupboard producing an amazing display of vocal dexterity, from airy fragility to screaming rock, and adding her unique sparkle to the project.
Simon Snaize (buy his album!) from Keegan Snaize and Aktual Records created the most energising, mesmorising, original and ear splitting guitar work I have ever heard and got me my one and only noise complaint from the neighbours (even after all that soundproofing).
Then I spent ages doing my vocals again over this tremendous noise.

And now its all there waiting to be mixed, waiting for a name, and waiting to be heard. We still need a band name (help!) and I’m about to start finding out about really dull stuff like distribution, PR and promotion. If anybody knows about this stuff and wants to help get in touch!

Right. I’m off to shave off my beard and have a wash.

www.chris-johnson.info

Hazzard County Saloon

Helen and Steve are cool. Steve builds boats and has extraordinary parties on his boat yard. One of the bands I play in, Hazzard County, are lucky enough to be invited to perform at some of these parties when they happen and they are some of the most fun gigs I’ve ever done.

 

There is no road to the boat yard so the gear is loaded onto boats in Whitby and shipped up the Esk. Or if the tide is out its pulled on a tiny trailer by a lawnmower alongside the raliway line that passes the back of the boat yard.

 

Guests have to walk a mile or so through the fields and along the railway line and under the viaduct carrying their booze, guitars, fireworks and sleeping bags. If it’s after the pub you need a good torch.

 

The place is beautiful and secluded and made amazing by the efforts of Steve and Helen. The party last week was for Helen’s birthday, and they had built a full sized, fully functioning Wild West Saloon on an enormous jetty out on the river. It had a bar, chandeliers, swing doors, us playing, big open windows, a tree growing through the roof and room for a few hundred people. The guests were dressed in ‘Cowboys and Indians’ gear and brought tents or teepees to sleep in. The corral, the saloon, the uneven ground, the drunk cowboys, the hillbilly music, the tents, the candles and the campfires created the disturbingly real but pleasingly magical effect of being at a real western saloon, or a least, on a film set of one.

 

We were up past dawn making a right row.

 

Some of the most memorable and amazing times in my life have been the result of wonderful people putting in an immense effort to create a little bit of magic. It brings me joy to know that, although we’re so frequently surrounded by negativity, idleness, cynicism, the unimaginative, the jaded, and the stuck-in-a-routine sluggish crap big brother awfulness of so many people’s existence, that there are folks who’ll go to enormous effort to bring a sparkle to their friends eyes. To put a little bit of magic in their lives, if only for moment.

 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more of us were like that and put the effort in to shake people up a bit and remind them to live a bit once in a while, remind them to be a bit of a kid sometimes. Remember what it was like making dens, rolling down hills, building assault causes, racing bikes, hiding, garden hopping, playing on building sites and swinging over becks…?

 

 

Helen and Steve are cool.

 

Memories of Quebec

The last time I was in Quebec was about 7 years ago when I was backpacking around Canada with my friend Dee just to see what it was like. We stayed in a small and cluttered hostel one night and didn’t sleep much because some guy in the dorm was snoring loudly. These days I’d throw things at him but I was a bit more timid back then. We couldn’t find an alternative place to sleep the next night so we ended up staying out as late as the bars would let us, and then trekking up the promenade to the park at the citadel and sleeping on a bench up there.

I hadn’t really thought about any of this until I checked into my hotel room in the middle of the old town in Quebec last Thursday. I had a gig with Fish on the Friday. Some places you return to after a few years often seem a bit different – the dimensions are wrong and things seem closer together than they were the first time you saw them. Quebec, however, was precisely as I’d remembered it. I knew my way around and could find everything really easily, so I thought it would be a laugh to go and see the place where I’d kipped in the park all those years ago. 

It was strange making my way along the wooden promenade and up the steps to the citadel. Thoughts that had only briefly crossed my mind once years ago came back as if prompted by little scenes and views. This was where we took that photo; that was where I thought that bloke was gonna mug us (what was he doing out so late?); this is where those kids were huddled on the bench getting high; and so on. 

I reached the top of the stairway where the circular viewing platform was that I’d slept on before. Its like a bandstand with a bench curving around the outside so you sit looking into the middle. I remembered that we had reasoned it safe because it was elevated so you could see the deserted parkland all around, and it backed onto the cliff top so no-one could surprise you by creeping up behind. We were still a bit scared though, and it took a little while to fall asleep cuddling our rucksacks on our knees.

But I remember waking up a few hours later when it was still dark and there was a person sat on the bench opposite us. It was too dark to see if the figure was a man or a woman. I didn’t move or make any noise or anything, but I must have fallen back to sleep after a while. The next time I awoke the person was gone.

I had totally forgotten about this encounter until now. I even forgot to ask Dee the next morning if she had noticed the figure, but coming back here I remember. What unnerves me a bit is that I now remember other occasions in my life when something similar has happened, that I haven’t consciously acknowledged until now.

Sat on that bench in Quebec reminiscing and suddenly I’m 16 again pissing it up in Acomb having just finished the final exam of my GCSE’s. Me and Richard Maddison sat on a low wall by a deserted garage with a few tins in the early hours of the morning. I lean back and lie on the floor with my feet on the wall, dizzy with booze, and doze off. When I wake up Richard has gone but there’s an old woman in a white nightie facing away from me sat on the wall next to where my feet are resting. I sit up and she looks into my face and just says “Help me” a few times before I get creeped out and wander off to find Richard wrestling with the swings on the Green. As soon as I find him I forget the old woman. Until now.

There was another time years later after a gig for the York Uni summer ball when I stayed up all night and fell asleep, still in gig clothes, on the flood-bank by the river at about 6am. It was sunny and I had my shades on. I woke up at one point then and someone was sat calmly next to me, looking away from me. I didn’t say anything and it didn’t strike me as odd, but when I woke up again my boots were gone.

Who are these mysterious visitors I get when I sleep outside? What do they want? Are they real or just characterizations of elements of my personality made flesh by exhaustion and booze? How come I had completely forgotten all of them and how come it was Quebec that brought them all back? 

And what if I wake up one day and they’re all there, side by side, looking down at me from the bottom of the bed?

I want my boots back.

Back To Normality (ish)

 

Back to normality after a month of living on a bus with a load of hairy arsed blokes (not that I was looking) half of whom managed to get ill or sustain an injury or both. There was a lot of vomiting, pooing, bloodshed, coughing, wheezing, head banging (not to music) and general unpleasantness that you really don’t want when you’re all living together in a big metal box. Fish is calling it the Purple Heart tour and with good reason.

 

Best moment was the immense gig at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, and the worst was the charity gig at the Indigo2 when our backline guy had tuned my guitar strings to the wrong notes. I bounded onstage all confident and charged up cos everything had sounded great in soundcheck and there were loads of press and industry and celebrities there and we were gonna rock the place. Slung on my guitar and hit the first chord – “Klaaaangggg!!” Precisely the wrong gig for this to happen. We were only doing 3 tunes and a blow like that stays with you for at least 10 minutes before your confidence returns. Added to this was the weird monitoring that had completely changed since soundcheck and was so shrill and toppy that it was a struggle not to keep wincing. A shame really. We didn’t get to show all those people how good we can be.

 

The photo above is outside the Citadel in Plymouth looking out to sea. The benches each have a memorial plaques commemorating someone who has died but in life really enjoyed that particular view. It made me think of a story where on certain evenings as the sun goes down the apparitions of the deceased shimmer into view, each on their own dedicated bench, forced to sit next to each other for eternity. And they don’t quite get on! They bicker about whose bench is best and whose relatives have most recently visited and if they left flowers. The seagulls tend favour one of the benches to poo on, much to the annoyance of its powerless tenant and the amusement of the others. There’s even spaces in the second row of benches where you can tell they’ve left room for more benches to be added – perfect for adding more characters in the second series!

 

Just one of those stray tour thoughts…

 

Anyway I’m back in York now and planning the recording of the album. Need a band name first off. That takes ages. Every band I’ve ever been in has struggled with its naming. The best I can come up with so far is BadFace or The Whatever-The-Fucks, both of which sound like pub rock. We were always gonna beThe Snivelling Shitz but we’re not very punk anymore. I was once in an irish folk rock band and argued for months to be called The Potatoes or Bodhran Bodhran but the rest of the band voted me down and we ended up as The Malones. Boring!

 

I go into a craze looking at objects around me all day long thinking any of them could be the band name:Toe, Coney St, The Drain, Pylon, BillBoard, The Trousers, Telltale Stain, Noisy Vagrant…all rubbish(“…why do you ask, Two-Dogs-Shagging…”). And any discussion with other people quickly descends into band names with ‘arse’ in them.

 

The search continues.

 

www.chris-johnson.info

 

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