Ah yes Gnasher, me on bass, Kit Towlson on guitar, Roger Brewer on Drums and Smoke Abingdon on lead guitar. Kit and Roger had been in the band that went to Lebonon and Smoke was from Birmingham and had been playing with Kit in a band called Egypt, just after the Lebonon gig. Smoke and Kit were living at a big house in Highgate that had a few other musos living there. The Landlady lived on the premises, she was an aspiring writer, I think, and a cool person. Housing a bunch of aspiring artists full of testosterone and drug induced hijinks must have been a nightmare. The house was awash with music 24/7 and each day me and Roger would arrive every morning to practice in the tiny basement of 67 Cromwell ave. In the next room to Kit lived Rod Davis who was guitarist in Silverhead who were signed to Purple records. The other band members would often be popping in for a cuppa and a spliff. Bass player Nigel ended up in LA a few years later and turned up in a little band called Blondie, whilst their singer Michel des Bares found his fame in the Power Station and played the Philly leg of Live aid. But that was years later, for now it was 1972 and we were all fledgling stars in the making, or so we thought
A good friend of ours, from the Lebonon gig was Mick Hodgekinson, Hammond player, who had got himself into a signed band, and lived just around the corner, so to speak in Crouch end. He was a frequent visitor and a sort of surrogate fifth member of Gnasher. It was Mick who eventually got us introduced to EMI publishing and the Heath brothers, sons of the famous Ted Heath, 50's band leader.
Before we could make these connections though we had to have some sort of a demo tape. Studios were out of the question as we were all barely surviving on the dole and the cost of going into a studio was way beyond our means. There was no home studio equipment back in those days. However Kit had a Revox reel to reel tape machine, with big ten inch spools of 1/4 inch tape, which could do stuff called sound on sound. How it worked was like this.
You could record something, say a guitar, onto one side of the stereo tape, then play that back and record a vocal onto the other track. On this second take you could send the original guitar to be mixed with the new vocal so that if you played back this 2nd take it would have both guitar and vocal on the same track, hence sound on sound.
However getting the right balance between guitar and vocal was a bit touch and go as there was no way to alter the levels afterwards. You could repeat this process by sending your recording of two things back to track one and add another instrument, although that meant wiping off your very first guitar. You could go on repeating this to and fro recording, adding layer upon layer as long as you wanted. The only problem though was that as each layer went on the first few layers became less defined, you would lose clarity. So to achieve a decent demo you could only do about six or seven layers.
We got pretty good at anticipating how sounds would degrade. For instance we would record the bass guitar early on, very trebley, sounding like Duane Eddy, maybe second take, so that by the time we had bounced it five or six times it would sound like a bass as the degradation set in.
So many times you would find that you had miscalculated the volume of an earlier bounce and the recording would have to be abandoned and started again, it was tedious.
We did actually get some good results though now and again and even managed to get one of our demos cut to the B side of one of our singles. Something unheard of at the time, but that's another story.
So with our demos of original Gnasher songs we approached all the major and minor labels we could get appointments with. We met with rejection after rejection until one day we were introduced to a minor arm of the mighty EMI recording company. This was a music publishing company called Robbins music. We met the Heath brothers who seemed to see some potential in us and wanted to hear more of our stuff. Their offices were in a little back alley behind Denmark St, Tin Pan Alley, the hub of the industry, maybe this was the start of something big.
The next week we arrived with more demos and sat down in their plush offices to wow them, hopefully with our new stuff. Now we were not a pop band, we were serious sensitive artistes, the kind of band that were destined to make albums, not trite pop singles, our music was for grown ups, we were on the sophisticated side of rock music and wanted to be taken seriously.
We did have our lighter side, but that wasn't Gnasher, So imagine our horror when at the end of our demo suddenly coming out of the speakers is a silly song we had recorded as a bit of a laugh one stoned afternoon called Baby your my Doughnut. It shouldn't have been on that tape but it was. Our credibility was at once shot to pieces, cringe. We leaped up to hit the stop button but Nick said hold on, lets hear this through, I like the sound of this.
The next thing we know is we're signing a publishing contract with Robbins Music to make a one off single. We were adamant that this couldn't be a Gnasher record, so they suggested we record it under a pseudonym. We became "Bill Esher and the Beacons" and were booked into a studio owned by Dick James, who published all the early Beatles records. He had a new label called Jam records and we were to be one of his first signings to this new label. We were a bit apprehensive about this strange twist of fate but happy to go along with it as it meant we got to record in a proper studio and you never know we might get a novelty pop hit and make some money, after all we were in a hit stable with Dick James.
As it turned out this was a label set up for Dicks son to play with, and perhaps his son wasn't quite as astute as his dad, but a few months later Baby your my doughnut by Bill Esher and the beacons hit the record shops and we waited for it to sweep the nation, but it didn't.
I was responsible for writing this little gem, and I had got to sing lead vocals on my first single, signed to EMI publishing, the only way was up.
Meanwhile Gnasher were starting to pick up gigs here and there, but they were thin on the ground so we decided to try for gigs in Germany where lots of English bands seemed to find favour. We managed to get a months work in a club in Munich called the PN Hit house. We took a small truck that belonged to Roger, and also my Morris 1000, as a run about once we got there.It took us two and a half days to get there, finally finding the club at two in the afternoon.
We met with the owner who told us to get set up so we could do the audition. Audition!, we thought we were booked, but no, not unless Mr Neumann approved. Luckily we passed and were booked for the month. You start to play at 9pm, for forty five minutes, then have a fifteen minute break, then play another forty five minutes. You do that until 4am and then you can finish, Monday ze club est closed you have holiday. I think we made about £250 for the week, for the whole band. We stayed in a bleak apartment in a tower block with bunk beds, and no cooking facilities, that belonged to Herr Neumann.
We were a bit of a hit in Munich, and although it was hard work we were young and had the stamina and the drugs to see us through. By the time we made it back to England we were a very tight little unit and ready to storm the London scene. We managed to blag gigs at the famous Marquee club and the Speakeasy but there would be weeks between gigs, it was frustrating after so much playing in Germany.
Things began to move on the recording side of things though, we had managed to get some interest from Deep Purples' record label, but it was slow going.
In the meantime Nick and Tim had us do another one off single. We were to be the session band for a writer of theirs called Gideon who had written a song for Princess Annes wedding. It was a sickly sweet sort of a song but we got to put a song of ours on the B side. We would go under the name of the Cromwell brothers, after the road in Highgate where we practised. Nobody seemed so catch the irony of the band name and it was released to an unsuspecting world a few weeks before the big day. It sank without trace.
Whilst our serious demos went to Purple we kept feeding silly pop stuff to Nick and Tim at Robbins music. Next to take their fancy was a killer track called Monster Reggae. This time we would go by the name of Frank n Stein. We had a one off deal with Rhino records, a true reggae/ska label that had its offices in Harlsden. We had studio time booked in Pathway studios in Islington where the likes of Elvis Costello recorded, but we had no time to record a B side.
The record company wanted to just put the backing track on the B side, with a bit of Dub mixing which was normal practice for reggae records, but we had other ideas. We wanted maximum royalties with two songs, an A and a B side. Nick and Tim wouldn't cough up for anymore studio time so we went in for plan B. We had this idea that we could record this other song on Kits Revox. We had become pretty good at making demos at home and figured we could present them with a track that would be good enough for a B side, and so Tutankhamen was born.
When we presented it to Nick and Tim they told us that the dynamics of the sound wouldn't be able to be cut by the mastering engineer, but we insisted they at least try. Nobody cuts records recorded on a Revox they said, it can't be done. Well as it turned out they could and so it went onto the B side and for me it was the best record that we ever made. In fact you can find it today on the internet as a rare classic of British reggae, so there, we was vindicated. In fact the record didn't chart but I think it sold over 1000.
And then we finally were signed up by Purple records and the days of silly pop records was behind us. Roger Glover, Deep Purples bass player was assigned as our producer and we were booked into George Martins studio, Air London, high above Oxford Circus in the heart of London. We recorded a couple of tracks for our first single and headed off back to Munich for another month at th PN club.
We got back hoping to see our first Gnasher single ready for release, but it seemed to be stuck in the works somewhere. We were expecting to get back in the studio straight away to start recording our album but world events were about to put paid to this. Our first single, Medina road sneaked out to very little fanfare, and flopped. Not that it was a bad record, it was excellent, but not exactly pop chart stuff.
The next thing that happened was way beyond our control as the Arabs hiked the price of oil. Oil is the primary ingredients for making vynal records and suddenly it was in very short supply. So the record companies stopped making records by unknown bands like ours and put whatever vynal they could lay their hands on to making records by their stars, the bands that would definitely sell. In the case of Purple records that meant Deep Purple. Our carers went on hold for more than a year, we did some sessions for purple as backing singers on other peoples records, but not on our own. With this frustration came rifts in the band and within a year we had our musical differences and the band split up.
We, that is Gnasher were a whisker away from where we would do tours and have hit albums, but it was not to be. We were often rowed in as session singers for projects that also never made it but all the time I was getting experience in the way you worked in top class studios with class musicians.
We hung out at the Speakeasy, and the Marquee with the wanna be stars but was always in the background just soaking it up . Gnasher could have been big, but all of a sudden we were left high and dry as punk rock roared onto the scene and overnight we were old hat. Three part harmony groups were dead in the water as London took a U turn back to the essence of rock n roll, and we were too far down the line to claw our way back.
The band did one more tour of Germany, that finished at the famous Star club in Hamburg where The Beatles had played a decade earlier. That was it I'ld followed my heros, tread in their footsteps and now we were old hat, time to move on. Goodbye to Purple records, goodbye to EMI, and hello to Fringe theatre.
Back with my old mate Maurice from the Wez Mcgee days I was playing bass at the Albany Empire. This wasn't so bad as the world of fringe was quite a hip thing to be doing and whats more I was being paid as a pro musician again something that had been lacking in my time in Gnasher.
Somewhere about now I joined Brett Marvin and the Thunder bolts who had had a number one with Seaside shuffle in the early 70s. They were really a jug band and played blues and we did constant tours of the University circuit. We made a record that was Tony Blackburns record of the week on radio 1, but it never really flew and soon it was time to look for new horizons.
This was about 1978 and it was time to take a break from London and the music scene, it was time to go traveling. The next 12 months were taken up with various jobs outside the music biz saving up to go on a trip to South America, and Machu Pitchu, the ancient lost city of the Incas.
1979 -1980 were taken up with this adventure which ended up in visiting friends in North America, and almost staying there but after a few months in Woodstock we returned to London. The route to stardom had taken a few strange turns and once back in London it never really clicked again. The scene moves on so fast and I was out of step with it all.
I joined an Irish band playing lots of gigs on the London Irish circuit whilst still writing songs and looking for that elusive new publishing contract that never came. By 1986 it was time to call it a day and I finally left London for a holiday back in the Lake district to regroup. I found a caravan for rent in the Rusland valley and thought maybe I would stay for the summer of 88 before going back to London, but I never made it back
