Sixties Music: GRAHAM BOND

GRAHAM BOND: 

THERE’S A BOND BETWEEN US 

The mighty Graham Bond was one of the vital catalysts of 

 the Jazz-R&B cross-over scene that ignited the 1960s. 

He lived – and died, at the extreme edge 

 of the changes that defined the decade… 

 PRE-ORGANISATION 

‘Gonks Go Beat’ (1965) is an appalling film. It was ill-advised even as a tacky merchandising tie-in for the brief mid-sixties fad for spherical googly-eyed Gonk soft-toys. But alongside ‘Carry On...’ regulars Kenneth Connor, Terry Scott, Arthur Mullard and Frank ‘Are You Being Served’ Thornton – who attempt to make the best of Robert Hartford-Davis’ direction, ‘The Craziest Musical Adventure Ever On Planet Earth’ offers opportunistic cameos for the Nashville Teens, Lulu And Her Luvvers, The Long And The Short… and the Graham Bond Organisation.

They perform a Hammond-organ driven “Harmonica” – ‘kinda stormy with an R&B beat’, in an unlikely Beatland fake-jungle setting, with prancing Go-Go girls, and Reginald Beckwith as a comic-turn Teacher in mortarboard and chalkboard. For the group, cool-denoting dark glasses are in place at all times, maybe to provide face-saving disguise too. But look closely, blue-shirted Graham Bond on keyboard has skinny Zapata moustache, Dick Heckstall-Smith wears flat-cap pulled low for his tenor-solo – when he’s not sitting on a stuffed tiger, while surely that’s Ginger Baker on drums. And – held aloft by gyrating dancers, that’s Jack Bruce as the eponymous harmonica-player! Inclusion in this Pop-trifle might have seemed fun, and maybe even an astute career-move at the time. But film of the Graham Bond Organisation is rare. You gotta take what you can get.

As the era recedes further into history there’s a reductionist theory that tends to be applied to – say, the Yardbirds. That they were significant only because they produced three mighty guitar-spanking heroes, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Wrong, the Yardbirds deserve their place in the narrative because they were a fine little Blues-Rock group in their own right who left a trail of defining singles and albums. The same is true of Graham Bond. It’s easy to write the story through the retrospective lens that Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker went on to become Cream, John ‘Mahavishnu’ McLaughlin played with Miles Davis (‘In A Silent Way’, 1969 and ‘Bitches Brew’, 1970) and beyond, while Jon Hiseman and Dick Heckstall-Smith formed the nucleus for Prog-fusion band Colosseum (recording Bond’s “Walkin’ In The Park” for their debut LP). But the Graham Bond Organisation was more than just the sum of its parts.

Graham John Clifton Bond was born in Romford, Essex 28 October 1937. He was adopted from a Dr Barnardo’s Orphanage, and educated at the Gidea Park ‘Royal Liberty School’. Despite a troubled childhood, his flair for music – by fourteen he’d already mastered four instruments, resulted in his first jazz gigs playing Eric Dolphy-derived alto sax with the Goudie Charles Quintet by 1960. Soon he was spending his days working in a sales office, and his evenings with the New Don Rendell Quintet jazz group. This was serious jazz, ‘blowing some of the wildest jazz within our ken’ according to journalist Chris Welch, in a sophisticated small-group interplay, with ‘Melody Maker’ voting Graham one of UK jazz’s ‘brightest hope’ in an early sixties poll.

His alto can be heard to advantage on Don Rendell’s hard-bop ‘Roarin’’ (1961 Jazzland JLP51), billed as ‘A Blast Of The Finest And Rarest UK Modern Jazz’, he even contributes one original composition – “Bring Back The Burch” a punning reference to group pianist John Burch, alongside material by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Plymouth-born Rendell later formed the celebrated Rendell-Carr Quintet with Ian Carr. But by then Graham had left Rendell’s combo to join Blues Incorporated in place of the mighty Cyril Davies in November 1962. 

Alexis Korner and harmonica-man Cyril Davies form a vital ignition point for UK R&B, turning ‘Skiffle’ nights at Wardour Street’s Roundhouse pub into the Thursday-night ‘London Blues and Barrelhouse Club’ as early as 1955, a venue where Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy and Otis Spann found ecstatic audiences. 17 March 1962 they took the ABC teashop basement, just down from Ealing Broadway tube, and opened a new club, with their Blues Incorporated as the houseband. Its shifting line-ups at various times include either Art Wood or Long John Baldry (vocals), Charlie Watts, Phil Seamen or Peter ‘Ginger’ Baker (drums), Jack Bruce and Ronnie Jones, while the club itself rapidly became a hang-out for embryonic Rolling Stones and Manfred Mann’s. Its notoriety became a springboard to Blue Incorporated being offered a ‘Marquee Club’ residency, at 165 Oxford Street, from May.

Graham Bond was taken on as Blues Incorporated alto player, although he became increasingly diverted onto electric organ. He quit the line-up as early as February 1963, taking Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker with him to form his own trio. Again there was a strong jazz background. Ginger had played with the Terry Lightfoot and Acker Bilk Trad bands, and enjoyed a Ronnie Scott’s Club residency before replacing Charlie Watts in Blues Incorporated in 1962. Then the Bond trio was expanded by the addition of guitarist John McLaughlin, direct from Mike Carr’s Trio – replaced six months later by saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith. 

Beneath the conformist complacency of late-1950s Britain, Jazz – both Trad and BeBop, in collusion with Beat Generation poetry, and the Angry Young Men of new-fiction were a gnawing subversion. And there was an increasing flux between art-genre’s. Richard Malden Heckstall-Smith – born 26 September 1934, had played St Martin’s Art School dances as part of innovative Scottish clarinettist Sandy Brown’s group. But he was recruited into the New Departures jazz-poetry movement too, in which Graham Bond and poet Pete Brown creatively interact with wordsmith Michael Horovitz and Jack Bruce on stand-up bass. As part of New Departures ‘desire to nurture legends and legendary events’ there was a jazzetry concert at St Pancras Town Hall celebrating ‘The Battle Of Culloden Moor’, a heady concoction of Brown and Horovitz reading with Anselm Hollo and Adrian Mitchell, backed-up by improvisational musicians Graham Bond, Ginger Baker, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Les Condon, Stan Tracey Jeff Clyne and Bobby Wellins. Barriers were dissolving with new freedoms in the air.

--- 0 --- 

GRAHAM BOND ORGANISATION 

The Pop charts were full of Frank Ifield, Billy Fury, Helen Shapiro, Cliff (“I’m Looking Out The Window”) and Elvis (“Good Luck Charm”), around that same 1962 mid-summer. But all that was about to change. It had amused impresario Larry Parnes to create matching popstrels called Fame and Fortune for his stable of pretty-Pop Star pin-ups, but while Lance Fortune rapidly scored a Top Ten hit with “Be Mine”, Georgie Fame languished back-of-stage in the resident bands of Package Tours. It was only later – post-Parnes, playing ‘The Flamingo’ in Wardour Street that Georgie was drawn into the vibrant Blues scene, noting and absorbing the musical tastes of the club’s predominantly black audience. He and his Blue Flames began sharpening their distinctively jazz-based Rhythm & Blues style. Soon followed by the Hammond-organ fronted Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, Ronnie Jones and the Nightimers and Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds. Creating an incidental portal of access for Graham Bond who, with only the slightest fine-tuning, was playing that music already. The barriers between R&B and jazz were already in flux, and they were about to be accelerated into new territory via that Pop-Rock axis.

It was another strange quirk of unlikely fate that led to the recording of Graham Bond’s debut single. Raymond Leslie Howard – born in Fulham 9 September 1941, was also discovered and promptly signed by Larry Parnes, as ‘Duffy Powers’. Despite a series of cover version singles – including Bobby Darin’s teen-angst “Dream Lover” and Michael Holiday’s sweetly tuneful “Starry Eyed” both in 1959, that elusive chart hit never happened, and Duffy quit Parnes in 1961, suffering from acute depression. At a loose end he followed Georgie Fame into the R&B clubs, coincidentally in time to take advantage of the Beatles first album. Track one side one of the ‘Please Please Me’ (1963) LP is Paul McCartney’s raucous “I Saw Her Standing There”, which Duffy Powers promptly adopts as a powerful up-tempo single, with a backing credit to the Graham Bond Quartet (May, Parlophone R 5024).

The ‘quartet’ at the time consists of Bond with the Jack Bruce-Ginger Baker rhythm section, and John McLaughlin on guitar. One of the first covers of a Beatles song, it must have seemed an irresistible combination, yet again the single failed to chart, despite its many positives. Perhaps it missed out because the Beatles original was already too familiar? Yet check out the ‘B’-side, “Farewell Baby”, and it’s an original Graham Bond composition. Nevertheless, BBC Radio commissioned further editions of its ‘Pop Go The Beatles’ show, with presenter Rodney Burke introducing the Fab Four’s guests Duffy Power with the Graham Bond Quartet for the fifth show, recorded at Maida Vale’s Studio 5, and broadcast 16 July 1963 at the family-friendly teatime 5-5:30pm slot.

Music was in free-fall all around the Bond Quartet. They’d come out of jazz and Blues, content to play extended jams and impromptu torque’d-up solos in clubs for niche audiences. And that was enough. As Pete Brown notes, ‘R&B provided a much-needed living and regular work for many non-establishment jazz musicians.’ Until the Rolling Stones broke through to major commercial success. They proved by example that there were receptive fans out there for harder music-forms, if it could be focused in minor presentational ways. By now the Bond Organisation were fixtures at all the trendy Mod scenes, the ‘100 Club’ on Oxford Street, while an October 1964 set at the legendary ‘Klooks Kleek’ was pirated, the tapes circulating privately for years before eventually seeing release. As such it forms a valuable document, catching the furious dynamics and group energy of “Big Boss Man” and “The First Time I Met The Blues”, as well as template versions of future studio material. Bond’s stage announcement credit to Ginger as ‘one of the most fabulous drummers in Europe’ leads into a startling “Early In The Morning’ drum-solo, contrasting its rough hand-clap driven official release.

And with the dawn of 1965, everything seemed to be dropping into place. The year opened with a major package tour promoted by Robert Stigwood, headlined by Chuck Berry and the Moody Blues. The Bond Organisation follow the Five Dimensions in the first half, before Long John Baldry takes the show into the intermission. And there was a bizarre tie-in single coupling the group’s jazzy instrumental arrangement of the traditional “Wade In The Water” – later a cool US hit for the Ramsey Lewis Trio. It showed just how strong the Organisation’s interplay worked at its very best. While the flip was the cheesy old 1957 Debbie Reynolds hit “Tammy”, a honeyed sentimental movie-song by Carrie Fisher’s mother. Graham’s vocal makes play around the melody-line, as though undecided if it’s a spoof – as in the over-the-top excesses of Gerry Monroe’s “Sally” which ludicrously reached no.4 in May 1970, or to play it straight and turn up its dramatic charm as – say, PJ Proby might have done. As it is, the song’s undeniable potential is diluted by little attempt at arrangement or pre-thought that just might have made it the breakthrough they need. Yet there were sessions across the dial on BBC Radio, taking them beyond genre, all the way from ‘Jazz Club’ to Brian Matthew’s essential Pop ‘Saturday Club’, as well as BBC2-TVs ‘Beat Room’. All the reviews were positive. All the correct connections were in place. Their visual appeal was never destined to be fanmag-shattering, but they were so hip it hurts.

With no formal keyboard training, Graham was unafraid to innovate, teaming his Hammond organ with a rotating Leslie speaker to create a phased sound. Debut LP ‘The Sound Of ‘65’ (March 1965) is top-and-tailed by regular R&B standards “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Got My Mojo Working”. The first sax-led with a mid-point solo, ‘yeah-yeah yea-yeh’ as he announces his presence with ‘everybody knows I’m here’, the latter evolving into call-and-response, improvised into ‘got my hrrrrrrrrrr working’ with both black-cat bones and mojo’s set to stun. There were two instrumentals, “Wade In The Water” – ‘signalled by a ferocious opening cascade from ol’ Johann (Bach)’s ‘Toccata And Fugue In D Minor’, plus jazzy “Spanish Blues” with flamenco flourishes. “Oh Baby” is jerkily percussive with a powerful Ginger Baker solo, while Jack’s harmonica locomotive effects propel “Train Time” (as it will on Cream’s ‘Live At The Fillmore’ set on 1968 ‘Wheels Of Fire’). Rough and raw in a way that – say, Georgie Fame is smooth and polished, a couple of original tracks have such minimal lyrics they verge on pastiche, but when they take off into the jazzy setting of “Baby Be Good To Me”, it flies. “Baby Make Love To Me” is a slow-burning Blues with harmony vocals and cutting harmonica, closing into the repeated phrase ‘make love, make love, make love to me’. Or the witty “Neighbour Neighbour”, in which an inquisitive next-door busybody can’t make out how ‘I make my bread’ or ‘how I treat my wife’. Perhaps it reflects the dubious life-style the Organisation were living? There’s a threatening edge to Bond’s ‘something bad’s gonna happen to you’, and irony in the throw-away line ‘my success is driving you out of your head’.

Just as Rock began tentatively venturing into improvisation, the Bond group was already there as catalyst, coming from an extemporising background. ‘There’s A Bond Between Us’ (1965), which came later that same year, is tighter, sharper and more confidently integrated than what had come before. With a group line-up photo across the cover, Graham Bond ‘looks like Sweeny Todd’ writes Vicki Wickham on the liner notes, and Ginger Baker ‘looks like a refugee from Greenwich Village’. This time there are four fluid small-group instrumentals, from the opening “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolf?’, through a cover of the Mar-Keys Stax specialty “Last Night”, then two group originals, “Dick’s Instrumental” showcasing Heckstall-Smith’s sax, and Ginger’s furiously percussive “Camels And Elephants”.

 The four-way group structure allows for no passengers, each a virtuoso player in his own right. Jack writes and sings “Hear Me Calling Your Name”, with its own jazzy changes. While Bond’s “Walkin’ In The Park” is one of his strongest originals. His slow late-night Blues “Baby Can It Be True” innovatively uses mellotron colouration. And there are two tracks from a Ray Charles template, with chanted ‘night and day’ back-up vocals to his filthy rasp on “The Night Time Is The Right Time”, and a playfully dirty adaptation of “What’d I Say” – ‘see the girl that’s dressed in green, put her down, you don’t know where she’s been’ and ‘see the girl with the topless dress on, she stays cool all night long’. The topless dress he was referring to was a brief and sensational sixties fashion.

There was the ‘Gonks Go Beat’ movie too. And then they play out the year with the 15 October ‘Ready Steady Go!’ (season 3, no.7), alongside Georgie Fame, Ben E King, the Fortunes and Dusty Springfield. To poet Pete Brown, ‘to my mind this was the greatest-ever British band, certainly becoming for musicians what the Beatles were to the public. I was a huge fan.’ They persist as a group’s group, appreciated and respected by other musicians and hip club goers, even when that commercial breakthrough fails to happen. The vital equation at the core of their sound takes the powerhouse Jack and Ginger chemical equilibrium, and adds an impeccable pedigree in British Blues, to equal bliss. Their superb individual technique honed by having to fight for prominence in fiercely cutting egocentric line-ups. But the Jack-Ginger axis is notoriously brittle, characterised by fiery temperament, already exacerbated by substance abuse problems. Their bickering and Ginger’s bullying led to Bond deputising the drummer to fire Bruce in order to defuse the irritation. Jack promptly joined Manfred Mann – and plays on “Pretty Flamingo”, before Baker himself quit. Yet the Graham Bond Organisation survives the departure of both, with Baker temporarily replaced in the drum-chair by roadie Pete Bailey, until Jon Hiseman takes over. He’d formerly played with pianist Mike Taylor, and in the New Jazz Orchestra.

When I interviewed Jon Lord he confided to me that ‘Georgie Fame and Graham Bond – they were organists I listened to way back in the mists of time. So that’s where I came from initially. Graham Bond was my mentor. I learned from him. The Graham Bond Organisation used to play at the same Blues Clubs that the Artwoods (Lord’s group at the time) used to play at. We were usually the interval band, so I used to – figuratively speaking, sit at his feet. And I used to pester him with questions about how to get the Hammond to sound like this, like that, like the other. And he taught me an enormous amount. Superb musician. Very odd man, strange man, but a brilliant musician.’

There are extravagant stories. Of John McLaughlin passing out on stage. As he slowly collapses, his rasping guitar emits squalls of feedback. Rather than offering help, Jack Bruce stands back, notating the sounds for future reference. On another occasion, in mid-set, it’s Jack who shorts his bass against the microphone, receiving a flash electric shock that stuns him. As the gig progresses they calmly pick him up and lay him out on top of Graham’s organ until he revives. ‘Bond sat there like some pudgy mandarin (a pioneer in the distribution of facial hair he was, too), shooting his cuffs like some demented concert pianist and bringing his arms crashing down on the keyboards’ (‘New Musical Express’ 25 May 1974).

Yet Bond’s jazzy aggressive Blues would never find widespread success. Consider, apart from the obvious Ray Charles original, everyone from Elvis Presley to Brenda Lee did covers of “What’d I Say”. “Got My Mojo Working” was an onstage stormer, but Long John Baldry already did a stand-out version, as did Manfred Mann – with powerful Paul Jones vocals. So what exactly was the Organisation’s unique selling point? Some of their original songs were strong, delivered in that loose intuitively rough interplay that sparked magic live, but they’d benefit from a producer’s tidying to make them commercially viable, in the way that – say, Georgie Fame was lubricated by punching horns.

‘I went to see the band down ‘The Marquee’, playing to a sparse audience’ recalls Pete Brown. ‘Graham, keeping up with fashion, was wearing psychedelic kaftans and had attempted to persuade the others to do the same. Dick would only go as far as a Hawaiian-style shirt that looked too small on him. They had a good light show, but were still playing the same jazz and R&B songs, albeit supremely well.’ Invited to play the ‘Amazing Technicolour Dream’ Hippie-Fest at the Alexandra Palace they arrive ‘late, unrehearsed and disorganised and never went on.’

From his dingy Ladbroke Grove basement flat, a cash-strapped Graham watched his two former sidemen go global with Cream. He’d tutored Jon Lord on organ technique, and Jon went on to Deep Purple. It is the lot of pioneers, they open doors for others to pass through. With Bond already subject to physical and mental health problems, depression and manic episodes compounded by narcotics. Not the Mod purple hearts or Pep pills, not the Hippie grass or LSD, but the hard heroin of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, Chet Baker and William S Burroughs. As Pete Brown observes, the group came to an end in 1967 with ‘Dick and Jon having become disenchanted with Graham’s growing smack addiction and dodgy attitude towards the band’s finances’ (from ‘White Rooms And Imaginary Westerns’, JR Books, 2010).

--- 0 --- 

POST-ORGANISATION 

In a sense, this had been Graham Bond’s highpoint. For the duration of these two albums he was the coming thing. Yet even without that focus there was more to come. In early 1968, newly dedicated and attempting to stay clean, Bond set off to America – via an Irish stop-over, for twenty months of new adventures, without ever bothering about Work Permit complications. From New York they move to Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, courtesy of Lou Reizner. After all, hadn’t Eric Burdon recreated his career on the west coast, with Zoot Money joining his New Animals there? And Van Morrison was discovering a whole new US audience following the crash-and-burn of Them. English Rock musicians were immediately immaculately cool. Doors opened. Graham stands in when the Buddy Miles Express organist quits. He jams with Jefferson Airplane, and works with Graham Nash on an album by the Fool. In LA, Irwin Garr had launched Pulsar Records to siphon off the new counter-culture market. He scored a distribution deal through Mercury, with Mac ‘Dr John’ Rebennack and Harold Battiste stashed on backroom production roles.

And Graham cut a solo album lifting its title – ‘Love Is The Law’, from the writings of cult ‘golden dawn’ Satanist Aleister Crowley. There’s a hippie girl dancer on the cover, and lyrics with a slanted vagueness taking advantage of that new mood, although the sound is a logical organ-led evolution of what had gone before. The title track extends his mellotron explorations into the realm of cosmic imagery, ‘love is the law of the sun and the moon and the stars.’ The churchy organ of “Crossroads Of Time” takes that same Age Of Aquarius new-era feel, that after two World Wars it was time for a renewed morality, ‘ain’t gonna fight no more, no more, gonna make love not war, not war.’ ‘This is the age of Aquarius, the age of colour and sound’ Bond explained to Chris Welch (in ‘Melody Maker’ June 1970).

The theme continues with the jazzy organ of “The World Will Soon Be Free” which is based on his new wife’s ‘dream in colour’, although he and American dancer Diane Stewart were not actually married until Spring 1970 with a wild event at London’s ‘Revolution’ club. Her dream sees ‘the whole wide world was one big family’ while adding a cautionary note that ‘it was just a dream’, yet it anticipates John Lennon’s “Imagine” in that ‘dreams can come true’ and ‘the whole world will soon be free.’ It was a strong album, but was overlooked in the psychedelic tsumami of strange new names. Lacking distribution too, it was not even initially available in the UK, beyond a promotional single combining “Love Is The Law” c/w “Naz”.

As a reaction to 1950s social conformity the counter-culture media flaunted an admirable openness to alternate belief-systems, which could also be naively gullible. As well as the Maharishi the Beatles include Aleister Crowley – the self-styled ‘Great Beast’ (1875-1947), in their ‘Sergeant Pepper’ art-collage. He was the same occultist who exerted a fascination upon Jimmy Page, as well as on Genesis P Orridge of Throbbing Gristle. Before we even get to the dark underside of the hippie idyll personified by Charles Manson. Beyond good and evil, Crowley’s ‘Law Of Thelema’ dictates ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ Which can have unfortunate consequences to a certain mindset.

It’s not clear when Bond first became intrigued by this Dark Side, but it’s already showing its influence in his lyric preoccupations. There are stories he believed himself to be Crowley’s lost love-child. One of Crowley’s scarlet women acolytes gave birth in 1937, leaving the baby at an orphanage. On the tenuous reasoning that Bond himself was born in 1937 and adopted at six months old from an orphanage, the symmetry makes a certain kind of sense-connection when he researched this. He set out his beliefs in an article for ‘IT: International Times’ (September 1969). Yet it seems Bond’s flirtation was at least positive in that he used Crowley’s Thelema system to get off smack.

A second album for Pulsar – ‘The Mighty Grahame Bond’ (1969, AR 10606) followed, and musically stands as one of his most accomplished sets, efficiently fusing his jazzy keyboard with rootsy Blues influences. For the cover-photo he wears a colourful kaftan, maybe to lower visibility of his expanding waistline! He was also doing session-work with Harvey Mandel – he plays piano on “You Can’t Tell Me” on his 1968 ‘Christo Redentor’ album (Philips SBL7873). He also contributes to Dr John’s ‘The Sun, Moon And Herbs’ (1971, Atlantic 2400161) – on tracks “Black John The Conqueror”, “Pots Of Fiyo” and “Familiar Reality-Reprise”, alongside such luminaries as Doris Troy, Bobby Whitlock, Bobby Keys, the Memphis Horns and Jim Price.

Bond might have been adrift in troubled waters, but he was still capable of making waves. Following his American sojourn he returned – via a stop-over in Jamaica, with spectacular highs and lows. He was promptly arrested and confined in Pentonville for alleged contempt of court resulting from two-year-old bankruptcy charges. ‘I was treated very well in prison and was allowed to play the piano and give a talk to the prisoners on alto saxophone playing’ he told ‘Melody Maker’. Only to be released in time to launch a new band – Initiation (with drums and percussion by Keith Bailey and Dave Sheen) at Pantiles Club, then a less-than sold-out Albert Hall concert, opening the set by playing a flamboyant overture on the Albert Hall organ (17 October). The brief Initiation stay together long enough to do a session for Radio One’s ‘Top Gear’ (31 January 1970).

From that point on, he became involved in a long series of abortive groups, including recording with Ginger Baker’s Air Force as well as working as part of Jack Bruce’s ‘Harmony Row’ (1971) promotion band with Dick Heckstall-Smith. Feelings of resentment at being employed by his more-successful former-sidemen must have been compounded by Jack subsequently firing Graham from the band!

‘Holy Magick’ in 1971, the name of the group and the album, arrived within a gatefold Stonehenge cover, on the prestigious Progressive Vertigo label with Graham and Diane Stewart as the nucleus around which pick-up musicians orbit, including Rick Grech, Victor Brox, Alex Dmochoski and Jon Moreshead, formerly of Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation. It’s an album of dissonance, chants, incantations, white magic, Celtic mysticism and pentagrams (‘my father’s six-pointed star’, Crowley as father?), over a jazzy improvisational flux. What writer Rob Young described as ‘steamy, rhythmic workouts heavily infused with ritual magic chants and mantric voodoo’ (in ‘Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music’, Faber, 2010).

It could be argued Bond is channelling mystical influences in the same way that Dr John uses his New Orleans juju traditions. Or as Sun Ra uses his outer space mythology. ‘I believe that an artist should prepare himself scientifically for the task of creation’ he told journalist Richard Williams. The sound of his organ swells and seethes around sharp percussion, and flaring echoing horns. Horn sections wail and stutter over pummelling rhythms. It is relentless. No compromise. No concessions. No hits! Diane’s voice adds edge and response. There are nominally eighteen tracks, but initially there’s barely a delineation as one track bleeds into the next for twenty-three minutes. There are snatches of motivational lyric – ‘seek and you’ll find, it’s all in our mind,’ and ‘there is no fear, that enters in here.’ With quasi-religious ‘thou art the kingdom and the power and the glory for aeons and aeons and aeons, amen.’ To Harry Shapiro who writes the CD reissue liner-notes it’s ‘a magical ritual done in the Ray Charles mode’… maybe, but whatever in means it’s a stunningly-conceived extended piece.

The last four tracks stand slightly apart. “The Judgement” retains a recognisable blues form, with piano and gospel voices, while the millenarian lyrics exhorts ‘the end has just begun’ and that ‘it is too late for changing, now that god has made the plan… to start the Earth’s new cycle.’ Then his appeals for King Arthur and the wizard Merlin to return utilises cutting guitar figures around ‘the twelve holy knights of the grail.’ Those seeking a more personal insight into whatever is going on inside Graham’s head can find clues in ‘my soul caught the fear’ over the slinky slithering “My Archangel Mikael”, ‘when the chaos of this wicked world brings you pain… he calls, Mikael calls.’ He seems to be stripping himself to the core with ‘I’ve been dead too long, I can’t hide myself no more,’ into the entrancing “The Magician” where he confesses ‘I was a fool to think I could make it on my own,’ with a direct reference – maybe, to him and Diane, that now ‘we work our magic together’ and ‘there aint nothing we both can’t do.’

The second part of the project – ‘We Put Our Magick On You’, with its pentagram cover (‘the symbols on this cover, and the Tattwa or Elemental Signs on the inside constitute the keys to practical high Magick’), extends the themes into Hindu and Aquarian beliefs. Pattering toms lead into catchy girl-voice harmonies about ‘everbody’s looking for Jesus, but Jesus changed his name, his name is Harakhite…’ Despite dazzling keyboard-work, it’s not easily digestible material. It’s true that around the same time the Beatles Apple Records were hoisting the Radha Krishna Temple into the top ten. Quintessence were nudging into eastern sacred music, Joe Harriott and John Meyer were developing their fascinating ‘Indo-Jazz Fusions’ experiments, and even Black Sabbath were marketing their own Horror-movie brand of Satanism. Graham Bond was moving into strange territory, but he was not entirely out-of-sync with the times.

Graham Bond’s final recording project comes in the form of a link-up with poet-lyricist Pete Brown, who’d already collaborated with Jack Bruce on “White Room” and “Theme For An Imaginary Western” – among other classic tracks. It forms the culmination of a long-term mutual respect. And the album title – ‘Two Heads Are Better Than One’, works on a number of levels. It equates to a fusion of equals, with a cover collage showing great duos Batman and Robin, Laurel and Hardy, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Tom and Jerry, Tarzan and Jane, and Bonnie and Clyde as well as Brown and Bond. While ‘heads’ is a sly term for, among other slang usages, ‘a head of their time’, and a derivation of acid-head, meaning aware or turned on. The ‘Vox’ magazine reviewer says ‘if “Colonel Fright’s Dancing Terrapins” is daft, “Ig The Pig” is mad, with Bond hexing his former manager’ for disasters ‘down in Californ-i-ay’ (‘we put our voodoo on you now’). The Caribbean party sway of “Oobati” contrasts with the spaced piano and fractured experimental structure of “Amazing Grass”, and the lurching fun changes of “Scunthorpe Crabmeat Train Sideways Boogie Shuffle Stomp”. There’s free sax solos, powerful percussion, with Bond’s vocals and agile keyboards always in control. Soundtrack material added to CD reissues ‘shows Bond’s organ staying in control as the rest of his life falls apart’ (October 1992).

But more than just Bond’s final album – through a hook-up with Les Reed’s new Chapter One label, it was a band and a tour too, Graham’s Hammond C3 and saxophone, Pete’s trumpet and talking drums, drummer Ed Spevock, Lisle Harper on bass, with Diane adding vocal harmonies. Later, guitarist Derek Foley joins too, replaced by an energetic Mick Walker. Following a few try-out gigs prior to Christmas 1972, including one with Hawkwind at the Seymour Hall, the band takes to the road in a Mercedes truck.

There were college gigs, then to France and down to Marseille with Graham and Pete sharing driving duties. After a UK stop-over there were German dates, including one at Hamburg’s Stadpark. Pete Brown tells the tale of how Bond retains his mystic incantation “Freaky Beaks” for the set, which hexes enemies and hate-figures. It was surely coincidental that he includes the name of right-wing publisher Axel Springer, and that the next day Springer’s HQ is devastated by an unexplained explosion? Calling off backstage at a Gentle Giant gig Graham grabs a pass-around joint and ‘reduced it to ash in one blast’. As Phil Ryan (of Man, on the same bill) relates, ‘examining the saxophonist’s very expensive instrument’ Graham ‘blew a few things on it that the poor guy would never get close to, and handed it back, saying ‘great horn’.’ A drunk Graham Bond plays most of the Payerne Festival in Switzerland ‘from underneath the Hammond’, following it with excellent sets at Bilzen on the German-Belgium border with Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, and in Hanover with Arthur Brown and Zoot Money.

Evicted from a cottage he shared with Diane, the couple move into Pete Brown’s Montagu Square flat for the best part of six months. With uncanny prescience Bond and Brown play Burton-on-Trent’s ‘76 Club’ where Graham delivers a eulogy to recently-deceased jazz drummer and junkie friend Phil Seamen. Then at a Scarborough date ‘a seriously unreliably’ Graham collapsed on stage and was hospitalised, bringing the Bond And Brown duo project to a close. Following its demise, and a split with Diane, there was steady roll downhill.

There was Magus, a line-up involving Folkie Carolanne Pegg (aka Carole Pegg of Mr Fox), with bass-player Pete MacBeth, guitarist Brian Holloway and funky Paul Olsen on drums. But Bond’s unpredictable behaviour, his dependence on drug and occult lore, was leading them into increasingly bizarre involvements. Always a large man of voracious appetites, excessive in most things, his life and career were fractured by frequent depression resulting from substance abuse and his psychic obsessions. Stories proliferate. After Long John Baldry had been sent voodoo dolls at his Muswell Hill home, Graham visits to carry out an exorcism – with Ginger Baker in tow (Ginger called him ‘Gipsy Rose Bond’). ‘Graham told me that he felt he had taken something quite terrible and very heavy out of the house on his shoulders’ Baldry told ‘Melody Maker’. Bond returns home to find a live chicken nailed to his door – the ultimate occult curse.

An imposingly large bearded man in flowing kaftan, beads around his neck, he took trips hunting Ley-lines. Stopping off on tours he’d emerge from some local pharmacy with ten assorted mind-and-body-altering pharmaceuticals – explaining gleefully what each one did, before necking them all at once! He got beaten up after double-crossing a drug-dealer and sought sanctuary in a police station, only to be hauled into custody for the 35-pence bag of hash he was carrying. Subject to evaluation over his mental stability he managed to convince the psychiatrist that he’s only a Taxi Driver! He was held in custody for just shy of a month prior to transfer to Springfield sanatorium. Despite taking prescription antidepressant downers following hospital in early-March 1974, he continued to suffer crippling depression.

Pete Brown called off while Graham was staying in Holloway, north London with roadie-friend John Hunt. ‘He said he’d sworn off all the magic stuff and drugs and was now just going to play jazz and blues.’ In a weird limbo, Bond phoned ‘New Musical Express’ to line up an interview, ‘he sounded purposeful, optimistic, enthusiastic, and full of energy’, with plans for tomorrow. Then he went out for the walk from which he never returns. He died Wednesday, 8 May 1974 under the wheels of a speeding tube-train at Finsbury Park station in mysterious circumstances. An eyewitness claims he jumped. It takes the police days to even identify the body, using fingerprints. Only the silver pendant talisman star he wore around his neck escaped unscratched. The news shocked its way around the music community. Always unpredictable, Graham was never less than respected. There’s no clear verdict of suicide, accident, or victim of black-magic foul play.

There’s potential, and then there’s lost potential. Georgie Fame and Zoot Money also endure slumps and troughs but come out the other side into renewed respect and cultdom. While re-evaluations of the Graham Bond legacy continue as his work finds new audiences through re-mastered CD editions and YouTube uploads. There’s even a clip in an appalling film called ‘Gonks Go Beat’. It’s tough that he’s no longer around to enjoy it.

THE MIGHTY GRAHAM BOND 

1961 – ‘ROARIN’’ by the New Don Rendell Quintet (1961 Jazzland JLP51, reissued on CD by BGP, 2005), recorded 17 June and 29 August 1961 at Star Sound Studios, with Don Rendell (tenor sax), John Burch (piano), Tony Archer (bass), Phil Kinorra (drums), and Graham Bond who plays alto sax and contributes one original composition – ‘Bring Back The Burch’

May 1963 – ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ c/w ‘Farewell Baby’ (Bond original) by Duffy Power with the Graham Bond Quartet (Parlophone R 5024)

June 1964 – ‘Long Tall Shorty’ (Don Covay-Abramson) c/w ‘Long Legged Baby’ (Bond) (Decca F11909) A-side collected onto compilation LP ‘The Sixties Explosion 1962-1969’ (See For Miles SEE CD 223) and ‘Pop Inside The Sixties Vol.2’ (SEECD399)

1964 – ‘THE GRAHAM BOND ORGANISATION’ EP (Decca DFE 4616) with ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘High Heeled Sneakers’, ‘Little Girl’, ‘Long Legged Baby’, ‘Strut Around’. First two tracks collected onto compilation ‘Blues Roots’ (Decca ROOTS6), while an early version of ‘Wade In The Water’ is on ‘Blues Now’ (Decca LK4681)

October 1964 – ‘GRAHAM BOND ORGANISATION: LIVE AT KLOOKS KLEEK’ bootleg recorded live 15 October 1964 (admission 3s6d), with ‘Wade In The Water’, ‘Big Boss Man’, ‘Early In The Morning’ (with Ginger Baker drum solo), ‘Person To Person Blues’ (with Heckstall-Smith tenor solo), ‘Spanish Blues’, ‘Introduction By Dick Jordan’ (stage banter), ‘The First Time I Met The Blues’ (Buddy Guy), ‘Stormy Monday’ (Willie Dixon), ‘Train Time’, ‘What’d I Say’. Produced by Giogio Gomelsky, liner notes by Chris Welch. First released in the UK as ‘The Beginning Of Jazz-Rock’ in 1977 as Charly CR300-17, then under various titles, by Decal LIK-47 in 1988 as ‘Live At Klooks Kleek’ and as ‘Person To Person Blues’ by Metrodome METRO431 in 2000, also Charly CD214

January 1965 – ‘Wade In The Water’ c/w ‘Tammy’ (Columbia DB7471)

March 1965 – ‘THE SOUND OF ‘65’ Graham Bond Organisation LP (Columbia 33SX1711) Graham Bond, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, with side one: ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ (Willie Dixon), ‘Baby Make Love To Me’, ‘Neighbour, Neighbour’, ‘Early In The Morning’ (trad, group-arranged), ‘Spanish Blues’ (Bond instrumental), ‘Oh Baby’ (Bond), ‘Little Girl’ (Bond). Side two: ‘I Want You’ (Bond), ‘Wade In The Water’ (group instrumental, trad arranged with Paul Getty), ‘Got My Mojo Working’ (Muddy Waters), ‘Train Time’ (group composition), ‘Baby Be Good To Me’ (group, with Dodfrey), ‘Half A Man’ (Bond), ‘Tammy’. ‘The playing is absolutely confident, with the songs less important in themselves than as stepping stones to instrumental freedom’ according to Brian Hogg

March 1965 – ‘Tell Me (I’m Gonna Love Again)’ (‘John Group’ aka Bond-Baker-Bruce-Heckstall-Smith) c/w ‘Love Come Shining Through’ (John Group) (Columbia DB7528)

1965 – ‘GONKS GO BEAT’ Soundtrack (Decca LK4673) includes the Graham Bond Organisation’s ‘Harmonica’, alongside Lulu And The Luvvers, The Long And The Short, Nashville Teens

July 1965 – ‘Lease On Love’ c/w ‘My Heart’s In Little Pieces’ (Graham Bond) (Columbia DB7647). Both sides featured as bonus tracks on German CD ‘There’s A Bond Between Us’ 2009 Repertoire Records REP5117

October 1965 – ‘THERE’S A BOND BETWEEN US’ Graham Bond Organisation LP (Columbia 33SX1750) with side one: ‘Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?’, ‘Hear Me Calling Your Name’ (Jack Bruce song and vocals), ‘The Night Time Is The Right Time’, ‘Walkin In The Park’ (Bond), ‘Last Night’ (Mar-Keys), ‘Baby Can It Be True?’ (Bond). Side two: ‘What’d I Say’ (Ray Charles), ‘Dick’s Instrumental’ (Heckstall-Smith), ‘Don’t Let Go’ (Jesse Stone), ‘Keep A Drivin’ (Chuck Willis), ‘Have You Ever Loved A Woman?’ (Freddie King), ‘Camels And Elephants’ (Ginger Baker). Liner notes by Vicki Wickham. The two Organisation albums issued as one CD by Edsel DED254 (1988), BGO BGOCD500 (1999), and Demon DED254

1966 – ‘Saint James Infirmary’ (arr: Ginger Baker) c/w ‘Soul Tango’ (Graham Bond) (Columbia DB7838). Features Neil Hubbard on guitar, replacing Jack Bruce. ‘It was a true group performance with each musician concentrating on playing together rather than saving their efforts for their own solos’ according to Brian Hogg. Both sides featured as bonus tracks on German CD ‘There’s A Bond Between Us’ 2009 Repertoire Records REP5117

1966 – ‘Substitute’ c/w ‘Waltz For A Pig’ (Reaction 591001) by The Who, although the B-side, credited to ‘The Who Orchestra’ actually features label-boss Robert Stigwood’s other clients the Graham Bond Organisation, writer-credited to Harry Butcher, a Ginger Baker alias

February 1967 – ‘You’ve Gotta Have Love Baby’ (Graham Bond) c/w ‘I Love You’ (Graham Bond) (Page One POF014) Produced by Larry Page. Jon Hiseman on drums. ‘This was a strange single, with its peculiar mid-Eastern rhythm, frantic sax and pounding ogan.’ Both sides featured as bonus tracks on German CD ‘There’s A Bond Between Us’ 2009 Repertoire Records REP5117

1968 – ‘THE CROSSROADS OF TIME’ (Mercury 20134SMCL) by Eyes Of Blue, with Graham Bond liner notes, includes two songs ‘Love Is The Law’ and the title-track written by Bond through his wife Diane Stewart’s name

1968 – ‘LOVE IS THE LAW’ as by Grahame Bond (US Pulsar Records AR10604, UK 2011 CD Esoteric Recordings ECLEC2239) with ‘Love Is The Law’, ‘Moving Towards The Light’, ‘Our Love Will Come Shining Through’, ‘I Couldn’t Stand It Anymore’, ‘Sun Dance’, ‘Crossroads Of Time’, ‘Bad News Blues’, ‘Strange Times, Sad Times’, ‘The Naz’, ‘The World Will Soon Be Free’. Titles credited to ‘Billy Gamble’ (Graham Bond), with Harvey Mandel (guitar), Eddie Hoh (drums), Harvey Brooks (bass)

1969 – ‘THE MIGHTY GRAHAME BOND’ (US Pulsar AR 10606) with ‘Water, Water’, ‘Oh Shining One’, ‘Pictures In The Fire’, ‘Baroque’, ‘Sisters And Brothers’. Side two ‘Stiffnecked Chicken’, ‘Freaky Beaky’, ‘Walk Onto Me’, ‘Magic Mojo’, ‘Brothers And Sisters’ with strong Bond Hammond organ as well as Mellotron and alto sax, Harvey Mandel (guitar), Max Bennett (bass), Eddie Hoh (drums), Drachen Theaker (drums), Frank Mayes (sax). All original songs credited to ‘Billy Gamble’. Liner notes by Troy Randle

January 1970 – ‘Walking In The Park’ c/w ‘Springtime In The City’ (Warner Bros WB 8004) Both sides written by Graham Bond

March 1970 – ‘GINGER BAKER’S AIR FORCE’ (Polydor 2662-001) Ginger’s ten-piece big-band recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall, 15 January 1970, features Bond sax solo on Harold McNair’s ‘DaDa Man’, Bond vocals on ‘Aiko Biaye’, also Baker’s ‘Early In The Morning’ as on ‘The Sound Of 65’. Bond also takes lead vocals on the studio LP ‘GINGER BAKER’S AIR FORCE 2’ (December 1970, Polydor 2383-029) and writes ‘Twelve Gates Of The City’

May 1970 – ‘SOLID BOND’ Double LP (Warner Bros 3001) Graham Bond Quartet live tracks recorded at Klooks Kleek in 1963 with Bond, McLaughlin, Bruce and Baker, ‘Ho-Ho Country Kicking Blues’ (Bruce song), ‘The Grass Is Greener’ (Bond-McLaughlin ‘in a Mingus-like 6/8 groove’), ‘Doxy’ (Sonny Rollins), plus a 1966 Graham Bond Organisation Olympic Studio session with Bond, Heckstall-Smith, Neil Hubbard (guitar) and Jon Hiseman with ‘Green Onions’ and ‘Last Night’ plus Bond compositions ‘Springtime In The City’, ‘Can’t Stand It’, ‘Only Sixteen’, ‘Long Legged Baby’, ‘Walkin’ In The Park’, ‘It’s Not Goodbye’ and ‘Neighour Neighbour’

1971 – ‘THIS IS: BOND IN AMERICA’ LP (Mercury 6499200/1, Philips International 6382010) with ‘Stiffnecked Chicken’, ‘Walk Onto Me’, ‘I Couldn’t Stand It Anymore’, ‘Oh Shining One’, ‘Moving Towards The Light’. Side two ‘Crossroads Of Time’, ‘Baroque’, ‘Freaky Beak’, ‘Strange Times, Sad Times’, ‘Love Is The Law’. Made up of tracks from his two US-recorded albums

1971 – ‘HOLY MAGICK’ LP as by Holy Magick (Vertigo 6360021, reissued as BGO BGOLP35) with ‘Meditation Aumgn’, ‘The Qabalistic Cross: The World Of The Aeon’, ‘Invocation To The Light’, ‘The Pentagram Ritual’, ‘The Qabalistic Cross: Hymn Of Praise’, ‘Twelve Gates To The City’, ‘The Holy Words Iao Saluao’, ‘Aquarius Mantra’, ‘Enochian’, ‘Abrahadabra The Word Of The Aeon’, ‘Praise City Of Light’, ‘The Qabalistic Cross Aumgn: Return Of Arthur’, ‘The Magician’ with Ric Grech, Diane Stewart, John Moreshead, Steve York, Keith Bailey, Victor and Jenny Brox. Debut Vertigo single April ‘Twelve Gates To the City’ c/w a new version on ‘Water, Water’

February 1971 – ‘WE PUT OUR MAGICK ON YOU’ LP as by Holy Magick (Vertigo 6360042, reissued as BGO BGOLP73) with ‘Forbidden Fruit Part 1’, ‘Moving Towards The Light’, ‘Ajama’ (written by Gaspar Lawall), ‘Druid’, ‘I Put My Magick On You’, ‘Time To Die’, ‘Hail Ra Harakhite’, ‘Forbidden Fruit Part 2’. With Graham Bond and Diane, Terry Poole (bass), John ‘Pugwash’ Weathers (drums), Graham ‘Hedley’ Williams (guitar), Gaspar Lawall (percussion), Steve Gregory (saxophone). A 2008 double-pack as BGO483 combines both albums

November 1972 – ‘TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE’ Pete Brown and Graham Bond (Chapter One CHS-R-813) features Diane Bond’s ‘Amazing Grass’ plus ‘Lost Tribe’ (Bond-Brown), ‘Ig The Pig’ (Bond), ‘Oobati’, ‘Scunthorpe Crabmeat Train Sideways Boogie Shuffle Stomp’ (Bond-Brown), ‘CFDT: Colonel Fright’s Dancing Terrapins’ with Mick Hutchinson guitar, ‘Mass Debate’, ‘Looking For Time’ (Bond-Brown). Recorded at Richard Branson’s Manor Studios in Oxfordshire with engineer Tom Newman of ‘Tubular Bells’. A December 1992 CD reissue with bonus tracks SEECD345 adds single ‘Milk Is Turning Sour In My Shoes’ and ‘Macumbe’ (Afro-Gospel written by Lyle Harper), plus material for Murray Grigor’s ‘Maltamour’ docu-movie soundtrack about Malta, dubbed at the Islington Pathway Studio, ‘The Beginning’, ‘Aeroplane Drinking Man’, ‘Italian Song’, ‘Spend My Nights In Armour’, ‘Fury Of War’, ‘Magpie Man’, ‘Drum Roll’, ‘Swing Song’, ‘Sailor’s Song’, ‘The Ending’. With Erica Bond and Sue Wooley backing vocals, Mick Walker (percussion), Lisle Harper (ex-Gass, bass, congas), Ed Spevock (ex-Piblokto, drums), Derek Foley (ex-Paladin, guitar) 

1972 – ‘Lost Tribe’ c/w Milk Is Turning Sour In My Shoes’ + ‘Macumba’ (Harvest 2C 006-93828) Pete Brown and Graham Bond. There’s also a ‘Lost Tribe’ EP done in France for Pathe-Marconi

1972 – ‘A STORY ENDED’ by DICK HECKSTALL-SMITH (Bronze ILPS 9196) solo album recorded after collapse of Colosseum Mark One, with Bond’s organ, piano and synthesiser guesting on ‘Moses In The Bullrushhourses’, ‘What The Morning Was After’ (both Pete Brown lyrics) and ‘The Pirate’s Dream’. Features Jon Hiseman, Caleb Quaye, Chris Spedding, Chris Farlowe, Dave Greenslade. Graham Bond also plays alto on ‘Male Chauvinist Pig Song’ and other tracks on Steve York’s Camelo Pardalis ‘Manor Live’ LP (Virgin, 1973), and he appears as ‘sax-player’ in the 1973 ‘That’ll Be The Day’ David Essex movie

April 1992 – ‘THE R ‘N’ B SCENE VOLUME II’ (See For Miles LP SEE73, CD SEE4) includes Bond’s ‘Harmonica’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’

2008 – ‘LOST 1973 ALBUM’ by the John Dummer Band (Angel Air Records SJPCD276). Recorded in 1973, but shelved until 2008, featuring John Dummer (drums and vocals), Graham Bond (sax), Ian ‘Thump’ Thompson (bass), Pick Withers (drums), Pete Emery (guitar), Colin ‘Foghat’ Earl (keyboards)

 2015 – ‘GRAHAM BOND: LIVE AT THE BBC AND OTHER STORIES’ (Repertoire Records REPUK 1279) vastly significant 4CD covering all phases of his career from 25 April 1963 ‘BBC Jazz Club’ recorded at Paris Cinema by The Graham Bond Quartet with Bobby Breen, ‘Bluesology’, ‘I’m Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town’, ‘Hello Little Girl’, ‘Spanish Blues’, ‘Wade In The Water’, ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’, ‘Every Day I Have The Blues’. Then Duffy Power with the Graham Bond Quartet, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘I Got A Woman’. ‘Summertime’, ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’. The Don Rendell Quintet with guest Dick Heckstall-Smith from 9 September 1962 ‘Jazz Session’ at Paris Cinema, ‘Things Are Getting Better’, ‘Elsie And Ena aka Bring Back The Burch’, ‘Richmond Festival’, ‘Kelly Blue’, ‘Troika’, ‘Kazeef’, ‘Persian Party’. Graham Bond Organisation 22 January 1966 from ‘Jazz Beat’ 22 January 1966 at Playhouse Theatre, ‘Wade In The Water’, ‘Only Sixteen’, ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’. Graham Bond And Pete Brown from ‘Sounds Of The Seventies’ 23 March 1972 at Maida Vale, ‘Macumbe’, ‘Milk Is Turning Sour In My Shoes’, ‘Beak Suite’. Graham Bond and Dick Heckstall-Smith 1963 Home Tape, ‘Improvisation’. Dick Heckstall-Smith Band demo ‘Moses In The Bullrushourses’. Graham Bond Organisation Live 1966/1967 ‘What’d I Say?’. Graham Bond Initiation Live 1969/1970 ‘Wade In The Water’. Graham Bond Quartet 16 July 1963 from ‘Pop Goes The Beatles’ at Aeolian Hall, ‘I Got A Woman’, ‘Cabbage Greens’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Spanish Blues’. Graham Bond Initiation 31 January 1970 from ‘Top Gear’ at Maida Vale, ‘Walkin’ In The Park/ I Want You’, ‘Wade In The Water’, ‘Love Is The Law’ and 22 March 1970 from ‘John Peel Show’ at Paris Cinema, ‘Love Is The Law’, ‘Magic Mojo’, ‘The World Will Still Be Free’, ‘Wade In The Water’. The Brian Dee Trio featuring Graham Bond from the 1962 EP ‘Jazz And Twist’ (Vaux VA8), ‘Things Are Getting Better’. The Philamore Lincoln featuring Graham Bond from 1970 LP ‘The North Wind Blew South’ (Epic BN26497), ‘Blew Through’. Graham Bond with Ken Wray And The Joe Palin Trio, a 1962 rehearsal session at ‘Club 43’ in Manchester, ‘Sack O’ Woe’, ‘Mack The Knife’, ‘Work Song’, ‘Oleo’, ‘Things Are Getting Better’ 

June 1992 book – ‘GRAHAM BOND: THE MIGHTY SHADOW’ by Harry Shapiro (Guinness Publishing, Square One) well-researched biography with interviews, includes allegations of Bond’s improprieties with his step-daughter, reprinted in 2004 by Crossroads Press ISBN 10-1872747078

Poem: 'LAST POEM'

LAST POEM 

Beelzebub, take my legs
I’ve walked a million miles
I’ve done all the walking I need,
walked London, Rome and Central Park,
walked Malham Cove and Holy Island,
don’t need to walk no more…

Beelzebub, take my nose
I’ve inhaled the world and
breathed it back out again,
sniffed flowers, herbs and the
sweet moistness of women’s bodies,
don’t need to smell more…

Beelzebub, take my ears
I have the sound of worlds within me,
gulls circling above familiar harbours
guitar chords that haunt my memory,
the aching gasp of lovers
the cries of my babies,
don’t need to hear more…

Beelzebub, take my tongue,
I’ve said all I need to say
talked and argued with lovers and friends
sung and shouted and raved
at the madness of the world,
recited fairy-tales to children
and whispered soft eroticisms
while entwined in acts of love,
there’s nothing more to say…

Beelzebub, take my eyes
I’ve seen all I need to see,
the wine-dark seas of Crete
the gates of Graceland, the paint
and art and dance and sunrise,
the 9:11 towers falling,
don’t need to see more…

but Beelzebub, leave me my mind
so I can write
just one more poem…



Proud to renew my long-term association with,
and have my poem featured in the excellent new
'MINOTAUR #76' alongside fine writers such as
Ed Mycue, Ruth Moon Kempher, Geoff Bowman
& Jim Watson-Gove.
Issues $5 from: heartfirestudio@gmail.com

'MEAT IS MURDER': THE VEGGIE AND HOW TO BE ONE

“MEAT IS MURDER...!” 

THE VEGGIE: 

AND HOW TO BE ONE 

 Andrew Darlington gave up eating meat five years ago. 

(This feature originally published in 1999, and appears 

here in its original form). Are YOU still a Meathead? 

Why are Veggies on a demographic roll? Who says 

 by the middle of the next century we could all be Veggie? 

 Who are the radical outer fringes of the Paramilitary 

 Provisional Wing of the Vegetarian Society? 

And what is the hideous secret behind... Jelly Babies???? 

 “Believe me. Sooner or later all pigs get eaten. 

That’s the way the world works...” 

 Fly the Sheepdog to Babe the Sheep-pig (‘BABE’) 

MEAT IS MURDER.

The ad on the hoarding shows a cutely loveable little calf. And the cutely loveable little calf is saying ‘WHEN I’M A BURGER, I WANT TO BE WASHED DOWN WITH IRN-BRU’. Is that sick in the Benetton shock-outrage strategy of sick? Or is that inspired copywriting? Calves grow up to be cows. Cows become burgers. We know that. But we don’t want to be shown. We don’t want to be faced with the reality of it. Well – not quite so graphically anyway.

“To me, to eat meat would be like eating the flesh of a new-born baby” explains editor-publisher Michael Butterworth, forking Veggie tagliatelle in an alcove of the ‘Pig And Drum’ off Deansgate, Manchester. A friend, a lifetime veggie – and vegan too, we talk it over before I too quit my carnivore habits. “As soon as people find out you’re veggie they seem to feel the need to explain themselves. They go ‘Well – I don’t eat MUCH meat, to be honest. Only at weekends.’ Or ‘I only eat WHITE meat.’ Or ‘Sometimes I get a Margherita pizza instead of Meat-Feast’. I mean – hey, I don’t care. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Don’t dump your guilt on ME. It’s as though deep deep down inside there’s something that’s telling them that YOU have the moral high-ground. That deep deep down inside they know that there’s something faintly obscene about meat. They know it. And they feel the need to apologise for it...”

I’d been tempted before by the idea. But then, why the hell? there’s no real reason, is there? I enjoy food. I love eating. And what do Veggie’s get? Go to most restaurants and that option with the Green Tick comes down to a meat-free Lasagne hidden away at the bottom of the menu, and that’s it! And even morally – everything on the planet eats something else. The world is an orgy of mutual cannibalism and always has been. Life is no respecter of life. Was it William Burroughs, Philip K Dick or Mick Farren who said ‘Life don’t give a rat’s arse who lives it’? Whoever it was, I second that emotion. And just how far down the food-chain can you go anyway? No-one talks about rights for slugs, woodworms and bacteria – do they? It’s not even as though the major religious belief systems condemn meat eating, except perhaps those that subscribe to the idea of some kind of reincarnation, in which case you have a certain vested interest in not eating something that you might later be incarnated as. There might be six million Veggie adherents of the Jain sect in India who refuse to eat anything after nightfall for fear of accidentally swallowing some living thing. But to most everyone else ‘god’ gave the animals of the field to us as a kind of four-legged larder. Cut here. Chew on this bit. It’s convenience food at its most convenient.

Then my daughter, Susan, quit eating meat. And a gesture of solidarity was called for. No, not that either. It was more a put up or shut up to myself. So – from New Year 1994, no more meat.

“The problem is, most people have never even seen a chicken that’s not plucked, frozen, and lying in the freezer with its legs in the air. When you buy your meat you steer that trolley with the misaligned front wheel to the Supermarket chiller cabinet where what you’re buying is just another item from a range of hygienic shrink-wrapped consumables. It’s just another product. It’s in no obvious way different to buying a packet of Honey-Nut Cornflakes or a Toilet Duck. It’s a Silverside or it’s a Sirloin, it’s not a bit of a dead animal. It’s not something that’s been cut from the corpse of a living being. I suppose way down you know. But on the surface it’s not something that’s immediately obvious”, a reflective pause. Ritchie is a musician, keyboardist with some bands you’ve probably heard of, and some you haven’t. He quit meat long before I did. It was Hey, a life-style thing! Know-what-I-mean?

“As a kid growing up through the late-1950s in Hull I remember there was a butchers on the corner of Whitefriargate where as a part of the display outside they’d festoon beheaded pheasants, unplucked with their feathers and everything intact. But where the heads had been they’d fix little cups on wires to catch the steady drip of blood. Except the cups were never quite big enough. They’d overflow and they’d drip down onto the pavement below where they’d form little rivulets of blood that ran down across the pavement and into the gutter. This is true. As a kid, hanging onto me Mam’s hand, I’d walk along that stretch of pavement carefully jumping over those little forking streams of pheasant-blood. And no-one thought twice about it then. I’d hazard a guess that opinion has changed slightly across the years since, people wouldn’t like that now, something like that would no longer be quite so acceptable. People eat meat. People enjoy eating pheasant in exactly the same way they did then. But they’d prefer not to know the precise details of how exactly it arrived on their plate...”

Performance Poet Nick Toczek does a routine about how he gave up eating meat. About the withdrawal symptoms that followed his decision. About walking through the precinct past McDonalds and being assailed by the seductive aroma of flame-grilled burgers. About almost giving in. ‘Hey, just one won’t hurt, will it? If no-one’s watching and I sneak in for just one Quarter Pounder McWhopper? Where’s the damage?’

It’s five years since I gave up eating meat. Five years since I made that decision. And I can honestly say I’ve never had any retrograde tendencies. Yet. Never had the slightest back-sliding ‘Hey – no-one’s looking, just one burger won’t hurt’ lapse back into carnivorism. Yet.

“The day may come when the rest of animal creation may 

acquire those rights which could never have been withholden 

 from them but by the hand of tyranny... the question is not 

 ‘Can they reason?’ Nor ‘Can they talk?’ But ‘Can they suffer?’” 

 (Jeremy Bentham, 19th Century philosopher) 

“There’s a very good argument for saying that eating other animals has been beneficial for people in the evolutionary sense.” Ritchie again, owl-eye glasses, and his long straggling hair slightly receding at the front. He’s getting a little more philosophical now, to a background of pre-release studio electronics. “Go back some millions of years. Watch the herbivores out on the great African savannahs. They spend every available moment of every day just eating. They have to do that. Only by eating continually do they get enough of the vital nutrition they need to stay alive. Then look at the predators. It’s the lions and tigers and stuff which lie around basking in the sun, frolicking and grooming themselves. Then once in a while they go out and kill something – a gazelle or a wildebeest, and they eat it. They get in that one neat package all the nutrients it’s taken that gazelle all day to eat! It’s energy-efficient. It’s a bit messy, all that blood and intestines and shit, but it’s convenient.”

“On that far-distant day in pre-prehistory when Fred Flintstone quit eating nuts and berries and went out trapping mastodons and sabre-tooth tigers or whatever it was, it was an important step forward. Between meals of concentrated dead-animal nutrition they could use all that extra spare time to sit around inventing things. Useful things like art, mathematics, nationalism, warfare, cities, religion, CD’s, genocide – stuff like that. And you have to consider that, at that time, the world was one vast wilderness of wildlife, a global safari-park, with tiny pockets of humans competing as just one minority species against continent-wide masses of other and often better-survival-equipped species. In a way, it was OK. It was Tarzan. It was one-on-one. And it continued that way, basically, through much of recorded history. Human expansion was slight, population expansion got regularly pruned back by wars, disease and famine. The graph of human proliferation stayed pretty much horizontal. That didn’t change significantly until the introduction of things like industrialisation, hygiene, medicine, sanitation, inoculation – and suddenly that population graph goes from the horizontal to the near-vertical.”

“It’s different now. It really is. Today we’ve got a situation where the world is one vast city with tiny safari-park pockets of wildlife surviving because we allow them to survive. Wildlife now survives on human whim. And it’s surviving precariously. It’s not Tarzan anymore. The old traditions of murderous manliness no longer add up. It’s not a macho-hunter thing to eat a steak cut from the body of a cow that’s been force-reared and shot full of growth hormones in some huge ‘Animal Belsen’ meat-factory. Killing animals is no longer a big-shot thing. At the start of this century William F ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody was a big hero figure because he killed something like eight-hundred buffaloes in a single day. That was seen as admirable. In popular fiction – like Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’ (1912), the Big-Game Hunter Lord John Roxton is seen as being heroic because of all the elephants and tigers he’s shot. But now, people no longer see it that way. Nowadays, people like Buffalo Bill would be seen as walking eco-disaster areas. They’d be the villains, the bad guys pitted against the conservationist good guys. Killing animals is no big deal.”

“You can argue that the creatures which will be allowed to survive into the next century and beyond will be only those creatures that we need to survive because we consume them, as human world-population – now tipping seven-billion, reaches crisis-point. You can argue that the survival of pigs, cows, sheep and chickens will be assured because they’re useful. We eat them. If you can get badgers, stoats and weasels shrink-wrapped and into the hypermarket chiller cabinets then you could cross them off the endangered-species lists and get them into the food-factories instead. You can argue it that way. You really can... or you can say instead that sure, meat-eating was an important and justifiable part of human evolution. But we know better now. We’ve grown beyond that. We know all about nutrition. We know all about alternative sources of protein which are just as nourishing and just as good to eat. Unlike cutely loveable little calves, soya-based Veggie-Burgers don’t mind being fried, or washed down with or without Irn-Bru. And they don’t involve the mass wide-scale suffering and holocaust-slaughter of millions of animals. Of other sentient beings.”

Going Veggie is essentially a personal choice. In every case it’s down to the individual. But the personal choice also has wide-ranging implications. There was a joke going around at the time of Linda McCartney’s death. Paul gets the kids together. He tells them ‘I’ve got some bad news and I’ve got some good news. The bad news is – Mummy’s dead. The good news is – we’re having a barbecue tonight with steaks and sausage and burgers and...’ It’s sick, of course. But an inevitable reaction to the deification process that followed her death. In life, as a musician, she’d been the object of ridicule. In death she suddenly became a kind of hallowed Princess Diana figure, a martyred champion of caring sharing animal-rights. To Linda, according to Paul’s eulogy, ‘all animals were Disney characters’. A tad over-sentimental perhaps? A bit too fluffy little lambkins, doe-eyed calves anthropomorphic? In the real world few people see every mouse as Mickey Mouse, or every duck as Donald. In fact, most people eat ducks and set traps for mice. Yet “what Linda has done is equal to the anti-Slavery campaign” claimed the ‘Observer’ obit (14 June 1998). Not so, her real achievement was to capitalise on her celebrity, use her Beatles-related brand-name to get veggie food out of the weird-beard whole-food lentils and sandals shops, and into the Supermarket where it could, and does, compete on equal terms with the Silversides and the Sirloins. Non-veggies eat Linda McCartney. To their surprise, they find themselves enjoying it.

But now, at century’s end, and a step beyond simply going or promoting Veggie, Animal Rights is a big deal. Following the large-scale fragmentation of Left-Wing politics a loose network of radical single-issue action groups – usually Green or Eco-Friendly, has taken its place. Anti-Road Protesters. Anti-Nukes. Anti-Animal-Testing. The Animal Rights Militia. The Animals Betrayed Coalition (ABC). And the twenty-thousand-strong National Anti-Vivisection Society. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF), founded in 1967, can be seen as the Provisional Wing of the Vegetarian Society, and its achievements are impressive. Direct Action through press campaigns, assaults, Molotov Cocktails, arson and bomb-hoaxes amplified by the public sympathy their propaganda-by-deed generates has forced the Fur Trade from the High Street stores, letter-bombs and threats have terrorised scientists involved in animal experiments, while they’ve burned down abattoirs and virtually destroyed the live-export industry. Thousands of butchers shops have been sabotaged, and all non-medical animal experimentation has ceased in University Labs through fear of ALF ‘retaliatory action’. Current flashpoints include the introduction of genetically-modified food through biotechnology companies such as Monsanto (interestingly, the same company responsible for the horrific Agent Orange defoliant used in Vietnam!).

A sprawling anarchic confederation, the ALF ‘organisation’ is decentralised, operating on a system of semi-autonomous cells, so ‘official spokesperson’ is something of a nonsense. But we talk anyway. “People tend not to think about these issues, they usually have neither the time, nor the inclination to do that – until they are directly confronted with them on a personal level.” No dark paramilitary balaclava with slit eye-holes. No flack-jacket either. Just some degree of reasonable intensity. He continues, “that state of mind tends to continue until people are forced by circumstances to sit down and think about it.

Consider this. 780-million chickens are slaughtered for food in the UK every year. They are largely caged and selectively bred to reach maturity in six, rather than twelve weeks. This means that although their muscles grow faster, their hearts and lungs do not, causing painful deformities and heart disease. Their lives are nasty, brutish, and above all – short. People might not like that, but they accept it. Yet BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) ‘Mad Cow’ disease in dairy and beef herds started out pretty much like that. First identified in September 1985, it resulted in the slaughter of 3.85 million cattle. Then it was transmitted to humans in the form of CJD (Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease). Nineteen-year old Stephen Churchill, who died in May 1995, is now accepted as its first victim. And there have been twenty-seven confirmed human CJD deaths, so far. The whole thing is a direct and inevitable consequence of intensive livestock production techniques, specifically – infection passed on from diseased sheep fed as ruminant-bone-meal to cows. There can be no real disagreement with that finding…

“Oh for the wings of 

…any bird, other than a battery hen” 

 (“Spirit Of The Age” by Hawkwind) 

The process began after World War 2 when Governments realised just how dependant Britain was on food imports. So successive administrations of all political guises subsequently encouraged the intensivisation of agriculture to achieve self-sufficiency in food supplies – including the obscenity of factory-farming techniques. And it was successful, successful to the extent that Europe, the most densely populated and heavily industrialised region in the world is now also a net exporter of food, with the absurdity of EU milk lakes and beef mountains of excess produce. While the downside of all that is the price that has been paid, first through the horrific suffering inflicted on the creatures caught up in it, and finally down the food-chain to the infected human consumers. It was only then that public opinion accelerated radically away from the whole idea of battery-produced food, and switched to buzz-words like ‘organic’ which they’d previously ridiculed as faddy or eccentric. It’s the same with genetically-modified food. That is the current battle-ground on which the issues are being fought out. Agri-Business versus Compassion In World Farming.

But in a sense that’s also just a culmination of what’s been going on since the very origins of farming and what we call ‘animal husbandry’. People have been selectively breeding, cross-breeding, splicing and grafting plants and animals ever since the beginning of recorded history. The pigs we know and love through pop-Movies like ‘Babe’ (1995), are all descended from the wild boar, although they’re now virtually unrecognisable as even the same species. All the vast diversity of dog breeds are derived originally from packs of wolves. A Babylonian or an Egyptian from whatever-the-hell thousand BC would be confused by the wealth of apples, grain, and fruit that we take for granted. Because they’ve all been developed through generations of selective breeding. We live in a hugely artificial environment created by human interference in, and manipulation of, natural processes. Genetic modification of food takes that process into new realms of possibility. And people are understandably shit-scared of what the hell will come out of such drastic tinkering.

But ‘words are cheap. Only actions really count’ asserts ALF’s Barry Horne. He’s the guy who almost fasted to death in the final months of 1998 in an attempt to pressure New Labour into honouring its manifesto pledges concerning abuse of animals, protesting “this is not for me, it is for every animal in every torture lab. The souls of the tortured dead cry out for justice...” The pre-election document ‘New Labour: New Life For Animals’ claims ‘Labour is the only party to trust on animal welfare...’ It came to the attention of Barry, a Category A prisoner held at York’s Full Sutton Prison, serving eighteen-years for £3-million fire-bomb attacks on animal-abusing Boots and Halfords branches. He decided to bring media attention to what he describes (in a letter to ‘Arkangel’ magazine) as the ‘arrogant and indifferent attitude of the Labour Government’ by beginning his death-fast at midnight 6 October – and survived for sixty-eight days during which his weight dropped from 14 to 8st. IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, by contrast, died after just sixty-six days of starvation in the Maze in 1981.

The Animal Rights Militia issued a hit-list of ten vivisectionists it would assassinate in the event of Horne’s death. Spike Milligan and TV’s Carla Lane pledged support. Instead, at the point of death Barry withdrew, but only after he’d succeeded in splashing his grievances across the national press and TV. ALF’s Robin Webb went head-to-head with Home Office Minister George Howarth plus various defensive scientists on ‘Newsnight’. People talked about him, and what he represents, in offices and factories and boozers across the country. Two months, three months later, he’s largely forgotten. That would have been true even if he’d taken it all the way and died for his beliefs (he actually died 5 November 2001 of liver-failure). It’s not even as though he’s the first martyr for animal rights. Jill Phipps died during the Coventry Airport protests, crushed by a lorry exporting veal-calves to the Continent in 1984. Sound-bites and photo-opportunities have a habit of getting replaced by new sound-bites and new photo-opportunities. But things do change. Attitudes can make massive seismic shifts. Already Veggies are on a demographic roll – up to four million in the UK, from 2% in the mid-eighties to today’s 7%, a more impressive figure when you realise that the growth area occurs in the fourteen-to-twenty-four year old age-band – where it’s nearer 10%, and it’s among those with a greater investment in the future.

“It’s less than a century since women were being imprisoned, and died, to establish their right to vote. In the coming century, with an accelerating species-extinction and loss of natural wildlife habitats, the rights of non-human lives will inevitably become more highly valued. Scarcity alone will dictate that. This is not Science Fiction. This is already happening. It’s happening now. It will continue. By the middle decades of the next century people will look back on our intensive-farming and industrial abuse of animals with the same kind of gut-revulsion and horrified incomprehension that we feel about Nazi Concentration Camps. Perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll all be Veggie then... of course, right here, right now, it’s not always easy, and it’s not always obvious.”

“Non-Veggies delight in pointing out that ‘Na-na-ne-naw-naw, you’re wearing leather shoes and a leather belt!’ Stuff like that. Also, even with reasonably accurate food labelling it’s not necessarily easy to avoid certain animal-based elements used in food. I always enjoyed suet puddings, imagining suet to be some kind of a plant, until it was helpfully pointed out to me that suet is – according to the dictionary, ‘a hard waxy fat around the kidneys and loins of sheep and cattle.’ Suddenly it don’t seem quite so appetising any more. And Jelly Babies. What could be more innocent that Jelly Babies? But they contain gelatine which is a ‘water-soluble protein prepared by boiling animal hides and bones.’ Think about it. And just because the restaurant has Veggie-Burgers on its menu don’t always mean that they fry it in vegetable oils. It’s often difficult to define where the lines actually occur. Sometimes you just gotta be pragmatic. While at the same time you can never actually forget that ultimately, all meat IS murder. It is. Don’t be a meat-head all you life...!”

“do you know how animals die?/ ...the flesh you so fancifully fry/ 

the meat in your mouth/ as you savour the flavour/ 

 ...it’s sizzling blood and the unholy stench/ of MURDER, / 

 ...who hears when animals cry?” 

 The Smiths (“Meat Is Murder”) 

Published in:
‘HOT PRESS’ Vol.23 No.1
(Eire – February 1999)

CD review: VINTAGE: THE VERY BEST OF MOBY GRAPE

GRAPE JAM 

 Album Review of: 

‘VINTAGE: THE VERY BEST OF…’ 

by MOBY GRAPE 

(Columbia Legacy/ Import 483958-2, 1993) 

While what passes for Rock now abandons its whizz-tech brave modern faith in novelty, and instead rearranges the hand-me-downs of the past – Moby Grape were once capable of stimulating more kinds of mucous secretions five times faster than any other leading Bay Area band. They were San Francisco, but while they had too much song-centred Pop-sensibility to be truly hippie, they nevertheless turned that Beat-life into myth, then encapsulated it onto record. Moby Grape could chew on razor blades, with solos as thick as liquorice, yet never exceeding precise singles-length play-times. And if their legacy is this forty-six-track span of cold Kool-Aid, warm jams and live wires, with the Byrds or the Airplane as the spectres who haunt the album, then there’s still plenty here for artful style-plunder by latter-day audio inadequates.

The Grape were always capable of surprise. They still are, even taken track by track. “Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot” from ‘Wow’ (1968), the playful closing track on side one of their second album, is a nostalgic 1920s style ‘celestial melody’ supposedly done live at the ‘Fandango Hotel’, and it was originally designed to be played at 78rpm! Here it’s normalised to whatever rpm CD’s go at – but it’s still got an engaging off-the-wallness that throws your most casual preconceptions.

Singer-songwriter Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence hung out with the Grape between drumming for the aforesaid Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Takes Off’ (1966), and his subsequent cult solo work. But Moby Grape was obsessively co-operative. A fluid five-piece boasting five front-men and interchangeable roles. Each group member gets to write at least one song for their first, and best album, which is here intact. ‘Moby Grape’ (May 1967) was issued simultaneously as an LP – and also as five singles ‘A’s and ‘B’s. Even the sleeve – a straight personnel line-up shot, tells a tale. The Grape are grouped around a washboard, with Seattle-born drummer Don Stevenson holding the skiffle-instrument in a manner that makes it seem as though he’s inadvertently – or perhaps even advertently, ‘giving the finger’. A morally outraged CBS recalled all copies of the first pressings so the rudely offending digit could be airbrushed out. With ‘Vintage: The Very Best Of…’, not only is everything returned to its rightful place, but there’s more too, with live and studio outtakes aplenty.

There’s both the single AND the album edit of the high-energy whiplash-guitar “Hey Grandma”, ditto Spence’s intense-harmony “Omaha” with opening stereo phasing ripping left-right, plus a newly unleashed version of stand-out bass-and-percussive “Changes” – pronounced ‘Churngers’ by vocalist Peter Lewis, alongside its original incarnation. Diesel Park West did a cover of their 1:49-minute “Lazy Me (San Francisco)” on their twelve-inch vinyl EP ‘When the Hoodoo Comes’ (Food 12FOOD20, 1989). Here the Grape show how it should be done with the plaintive nervy-edge that only comes with raw first-taste invention. Subsequent Moby Grape albums are touched on more lightly, but can be even more eclectic. Stevenson’s “Murder In My Heart For The Judge” is a curiously-constructed song – hoarse verse, tongue-in-cheek chorus, later covered by Three Dog Night, with a storyline inspired by a drug bust. Then there’s lead guitarist Jerry Miller’s storming “Can’t Be So Bad” – first heard by many, including me, on the budget-price sampler ‘The Rock Machine Turns You On’ (CBS, 1968), punched home with solid horns. There are also two versions of Bob Mosley’s impassioned “Bitter Wind” taken both Folk-stark and full-group. All of which come from the more extreme and unpredictable ‘Wow’. Next there’s the simplified ‘Moby Grape 69’ (1969) providing the reflective country-clear “It’s A Beautiful Day Today” with Spence’s absence leaving them a four-piece. And finally the title track from ‘Truly Fine Citizen’ (1969) – a last-gasp after bassist Mosley’s walk-out to join the Marine Corps had further reduced them to a trio.

Never as important as Love or the Byrds, Moby Grape were nevertheless distinctively different from closer contemporaries such as Quicksilver Messenger Service or Buffalo Springfield, less instrumentally indulgent than the former, funkier than the latter, and mercifully unclogged by the milieu’s pretentions. Like they sing on Miller-Stevenson’s easy-rocking “Ooh Mama Ooh” from ‘Moby Grape 69’ they ‘had me a taste of the Big Time, lettin’ fools push me around… Now I’m coming home, back where I belong.’ This is a fun homecoming from a time when novelty and newness could still be exciting.

JOHN WYNDHAM: 'THE SECRET PEOPLE'

THE SECRET 

JOHN WYNDHAM 

 ‘THE SECRET PEOPLE’ 

by JOHN BEYNON HARRIS 

(JOHN WYNDHAM) 

 (1935 George Newnes, 1964 Lancer Book) 

The quirks of literary fashion are curious beasts indeed, witness Dan Brown, JK Rowling, and the ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ blip. Back in the 1950s Science Fiction was ‘that comic-book stuff’, regarded by the self-appointed critical guardians of proper literature with a sometimes deserved derision. Until the two legitimising escape clauses, admitted into the elevated status of respectability, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932) and George Orwell’s ‘1984’ (1949) were grudgingly joined by a third. For it’s curious that once John Wyndham’s books were published within those distinctive orange Penguin covers they became the fashionable face of SF, the seriously reviewed acceptable chic SF, elevated into ‘the Wells tradition’. With the success of ‘The Day Of The Triffids’ (1951) and ‘The Kraken Wakes’ (1953) John Wyndham achieved a quirk of literary fashion.

Although he’d actually been around quite a while. Those same readers who saw fit to add a little daring to their Lit-approved book-shelves, were unaware that Wyndham, behind a spread of aliases taking advantage of his wealth of forenames, had been one of the British-invasion writers, along with William F Temple, Eric Frank Russell and John Russell Fearn during Pulps most extravagant years. His first sale, “Worlds To Barter”, appeared in ‘Wonder Stories’ as long ago as 1931. It was followed by “The Lost Machine” – as by John Beynon Harris, in ‘Amazing Stories’ (April 1932), in which Zat, a stranded coffin-shaped Martian robot on crab-legs, strives to make sense of these ‘animal structures’ of Earth. It attempts to talk to a stalled car, ‘I was lost – the only one of my kind upon this primitive world… an intelligent machine in a world of madness.’ Mixing comic satire about drunken human behaviour with the poignancy of Zat’s final self-termination, the tale’s clumsy energy is matched by “The Man From Beyond” (‘Wonder Stories’, September 1934) – also told in flashback, in which Morgan Grantz revenges himself on the International Chemicals corporation by sabotaging their ‘Nuntia’ expedition to Venus, but in doing so maroons himself in the ‘Takon’ Valley of Dur where toxic gases place him in a form of suspended animation, revived by the six-limbed Venusian Takonians at a time when Earth has blown itself into ‘a celestial cinder’. And then there’s “Perfect Creature” (‘Tales Of Wonder’, 1937) taking an absurdist nod at HG Wells ‘The Island Of Doctor Moreau’ as well as Mary Shelley, when Una, a hideously monstrous creation animated by Doctor Dixon at Membury Grange abducts the Society For The Maltreatment Of Animals inspector – Alfred Weston, with amorously reproductive intentions!

Written with more fanciful enthusiasm than technique, ‘The Secret People’, Wyndham’s first novel, is a thrill-a-minute adventure of the same dubious vintage. But following his mainstream breakthrough Lancer Books fortuitously rediscover this modest debut – published in 1935 under the cunning guise of John Beynon Harris. For its republication, Wyndham made a few minor amends to the text, and adds an amused introduction, writing about ‘Beynon’ in the third person, justifying the title-blurb ‘John Wyndham introduces…’

Here, dashing young Mark Sunnet is a playboy whose entrepreneurial obstinacy has turned around the declining fortunes of his uncle’s shoe business. He rewards himself with ‘Sun Bird’ – a silver ‘compact little bundle of power’ rocket-plane in which he plans to visit a friend who’s farming in ‘Southern Rhodesia’. As Margaret Lawn is a red-headed mistress of her own destiny, who anticipates meeting an acceptable ‘play-mate’. The two link up during a stop-over at the Hõtel de L’Etoile in Algiers, to which he’s been misdirected by a taxi driver.

‘You’re lovely’ Mark tells Margaret, ‘and you’re a brick.’ They take a flip in the ‘Sun Bird’ over the ‘New Sea’, a project first proposed in the nineteenth-century by the French-born architect of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and discussed in a ‘New York Times’ feature dated 16 September 1877. Wyndham adopts the idea, and develops it into a near-future reality, a vast desert irrigation scheme funded by a consortium of north African states, at the Gulf of Qabés, taking in parts of Southern Tunisia and a series of lakes – or ‘Shotts’, in Algeria. So that when the rocket-plane crashes, the couple find themselves in the bizarrely surreal crisis of being shipwrecked in the middle of the Sahara! They pick up a cat they name ‘Bast’ on a diminishing island, only for their craft to get trapped in a sudden whirlpool that draws them down into an underground cave system.

Washed up in an artificially-illuminated cavern they enter a weird mushroom forest. To discover they’ve stumbled into a subterranean realm, with its pygmy inhabitants, threatened by inundation by the expanding New Sea above them. ‘Do you know what it reminds me of?’ says Margaret. ‘Pictures in story books when I was a kid – only this technique’s more modern. Enormous toadstools under which gnomes lived. There was one just like that in one book… but I never thought I should see the real thing.’

The ‘Lost Race’ or ‘Hidden People’ idea was an already familiar fantasy sub-genre, at least since Jules Verne’s ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Earth’ (1864, and 1971 in English). But even before him, as early as 1818, John Cleves Symmes had propounded a fanciful concept of polar openings leading to a succession of inner worlds, leading to Edgar Allan Poe making use of the idea in “Ms Found In A Bottle” (1833) and “The Unparalleled Adventure Of One Hans Pfaal” (1835). Then both William N Harben’s ‘The Land Of The Changing Sun’ (1904) and Willis George Emerson’s ‘The Smoky God’ (1908) use subterranean settings. Stanton A Coblentz’s ‘Hidden World’ (1957) – originally serialised in ‘Wonder Stories’ (Mar, April and May 1935) as “In Caverns Below” features the accidental discovery of the underground civilisations of Wu and Zun beneath Nevada. While Richard Sharpe Shaver created ‘The Shaver Mystery’ cult sequence of stories – commencing with “I Remember Lemuria” (‘Amazing Stories’ March 1945), as purportedly ‘thought records’ of ancient civilisations using fantastic technologies in caverns beneath the Earth’s surface. But the sub-genre probably reached its apotheosis with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘Pellicidar’ tales set at the centre of a hollow Earth, the first being ‘At The Earth’s Core’ (1914).

The highly excitable blurb to the Lancer edition of ‘The Secret People’, ‘Rocket To The Earth’s Core’ seems to inaccurately imply such an ERB comparison. ‘It was an ultra-scientific machine – but it plunged Mark and Margaret into the weirdest of primitive worlds… a land beneath the Earth’s surface and forgotten by time.’ Wyndham’s working title – ‘Sub-Sahara’, had been discarded by the publisher, who were equally dubious about the viability of his futuristic rocket-plane, but were grudgingly persuaded to go along with it. The story was published in serial-form in the weekly tabloid ‘The Passing Show’ (20 July to 14 September 1935), amid a mix of mystery, adventure-fiction, anecdotes and cartoons, where it was illustrated by Fortunino Matania ‘a man with a grand-opera approach to story illustration’ according to Wyndham. Later, for a one-off reprint in ‘Famous Fantastic Mysteries’ (April 1950) it came with art by the wonderful Virgil Finlay.

Subterranean life in the system of linked caves, corridors and caverns – illuminated by ancient Cold Light technology, is lengthily detailed, with Mark confined with others who had wandered by various routes from the surface to be apprehended, some for many years, with ‘native’ children born in the caves knowing no other existence. Factions scheme against each other, with a secretive escape tunnel project that has been underway for years. And devious gangster Manuel who tries to intercede with their pygmy captors in order to gain personal advantage.

There’s a carved pantheon of gods, ‘like and yet unlike their Egyptian counterparts’ which offer clues to the origins of these ‘secret people’. There’s an over-long theoretical history of the troglodyte’s origins – which includes a brush with Piltdown Man! Simpler surely to suggest that the creeping desertification that followed the last receding Ice Age, resulted in migration east towards the Nile valley, while a remnant population sought subterranean refuge? But Wyndham seems determined to draw Central African pygmy tribes into his scheme too. Perhaps their mournful melancholy expressions were based on photographs he’d genuinely seen in some geographical magazine, or – like Mark, ‘a travel film’, which left an enduring impression on him? A doomed race caught up in the modern world’s inexorable conquest. For the battle beneath the Sahara, as Mark shrewdly observes, is a war for the very survival of their realm too.

Because Mark arrives in time for the triggered confrontation between pygmy captors and prisoners, who barricade their caves with immense ramparts of felled mushroom stalks. A prison within a prison, in which the rebels are besieged. Beside him there’s American action-man John Smith, with leadership charisma. Mahmud el Jizzah, and skilled African carver Zickle. While, a dialogue with thoughtful English archaeologist Charles Gordon, takes a right-wing slant when Gordon argues that democracy, Socialism and Communism are not evidence of the triumph of reason, but simply modern religions. As Mark argues back, Gordon insists that the ‘fantastic idea that all men are equal’ is not logical, and that laws based on ‘Lower Common Denominator force brilliant intellects to abide by them.’ That even preserving the weak and unfit is not rational. The reader assumes this to be Wyndham’s ventriloquism, opinions assumed to provoke debate? What Wyndham himself self-deprecatingly terms ‘indications of the author’s later style… notably the character’s propensity towards continual chatter.’

Margaret meanwhile – as accidental handmaiden of sacred Bast, has put her time to more constructive use by learning the pygmy language sufficient for conversations with wise old Garm. While meeting, and deflecting the ruthless intentions of Miguel, who then murders Garm. There’s some gratuitously nasty torture when Manuel kidnaps Margaret in order to force her to reveal the location of the ‘Sun Bird’, even as the prisoner’s escape tunnel inadvertently punches a hole in the bed of the New Sea and so begins to flood the entire Secret Realm. Bast – the cat, survives Miguel’s vindictive cruelty to join the reunited lovers and their friends. First using the part-wrecked ‘Sun Bird’, and then climbing vents and shafts, to escape the doomed subterranean world with the Cold Light secret that will make their fortune… and a wedding to bring the novel to a suitably romantic close.

According to Damon Knight, after his war service, John Wyndham ‘in 1949 broke a bottle over his bows… and started in afresh’ (‘In Search Of Wonder’, 1956), evolving from such early playful extravagances to fine-tune ‘that astonishing, compelling gift of pure story-telling.’ Leaving ‘The Secret People’ as what Wyndham himself terms ‘this slightly period piece.’