A History of the Tortoise Head, part 5

The TNS were, to all intents and purposes, a covers band. There was 'Beast in my Pants', and the never-completed 'Kurt Russell's Beard', but none of the members really wrote songs. I think Ed liked the idea of writing songs, but he never got around to it - and was in thrall enough to the Ramones that he never got much further than an E-bar power chord.
When I brought along my guitar, and Tortoise Head was formed, the original members were:
Lee C: drummer, banjo player, and insouciant presence. He was my sister's boyfriend for a time, and I remember once chasing him round the school playing field for a good 5 minutes, him laughing all the way, after he had booted me while playing lunchtime football.
Rich: guitarist, whose elder brothers' love for Genesis had a regrettable impact upon his psyche. Rich was, in his quiet way, a comic genius, whose sex- and scatology-obsessed themes were keystones to the Tortoise Head humour. His greatest line was givend when we had a holiday on the farmland of one of Ed's family's friends, in Stithians, Cornwall. As we put up the tent, the paterfamilias came to see what we were doing. 'Are you going to dig a latrine?', he asked, jokingly. 'I don't dig latrines, said Rich, 'I fill them.' When Rich and Ed went to Aberystwyth university in 1987 (Ed dropped out after a term and joined myself and Si at Warwick) the letters he sent, sure markers of a degree of psychological disintegration, sent me into gales of laughter. I still have them, though at 39, they're a harder read than they used to be.
Lee E: bass player, driver, and for some time de facto financial supporter of the band, as he was the only one working while the rest of us were at university. Lee was an unreliable bass player; not unskilled, but with a poor sense of the beat, rendering him hardly rock-steady as a part of the rhythm section. (This meant I had to play a tight rhythm guitar even when I got confident enough to be more adventurous, limiting the Tortoise Head sound.) His driving was invaluable though, especially when borrowing his dad's Transit van to cart the gear down to Ed's house. Lee had a succession of cars: a much-loved oxblood Cortina Mk4, in which the first compilation tapes were aired, and which provided us with means to go on the first 'Lads' holiday, to Cornwall; a Rover SD1, a remarkable thing that once saw us doing over a ton on the M11 on a trip from Essex to Cambridge which took a bare 40 minutes; and the red Austin Healey Sprite (a re-badged MG Midget) whose two-seat limitations ultimately proved to be an irritant.
Ed: rockist extraordinaire. Especially when he swapped the donkey jacket for a rocker's leather motorcycle jacket.
Me: my musical sensibility was different to the others, though we shared a similar sense of humour. (Ed and I were particular fans of Spike Milligan.) I was always into literate guitar pop lilke Elvis Costello or Lloyd Cole, classic 60s rock like The Who and the Stones, plus current indie bands like The House of Love and the Pixies.
Simon: an ex-officio member of the band and, I would say, my best friend in my teenage years. Si started many hares that I have spent the last 25 years running down (Ballard, Philip Dick, Iain Sinclair, and more music than I could mention, but particularly the Velvet Underground, REM, Cocteau twins, etc etc). Ed always cast Si as a doctrinaire NME-reading indie kid (anti-rockist in those days) but that didn't tell the whole story; Si just derided the metal lineage (Sabbath, Metallica, Iron Maiden) that Ed held dear, albeit with some degree of irony. Although he had a love-hate releationship with the band, Si was usually at practices/ 'jams' and later played drums and percussion on my early home-recorded 'solo' material, before I discovered the joys of samples and loops and the Atari ST.
Rich's family moved to Wales in 1987, and he found it increasingly difficult to stay around and play, even though older brothers and sisters were still in Essex. He eventually drifted out of the band, by degrees rather than by decision.
I didn't want to play just covers. Being in a band, I thought, was about playing your own stuff. I can't remember the first song I wrote, or the first one I sang to the band. I remember churning out something and mumbling the lyrics into a mike in Ed's billiard room (a nerve-wracking experience overcome by the sembalnce of ego), and the reception wasn't exactly enthusiastic, but encouraging and kind. This led eventually to us working on riffs or whole songs that I'd come up with at home. The first one was going to be called 'Lacanau to Figueras'. It goes: dum-dum-dah-dah-dum, dah-dah-dah-dum...

Why I am giving up the Arsenal, no.6

I have been relenting of late. I too have been scouring the blogs, wondering how good Samir Nasri is, wondering whether we'll sign Ben Arfa, laughing at the Robinho rumours and Hleb's idiotic agent. The circulated new kit looks like the 1998-2000 one with the white panel down the side, one of my favourite Arsenal kits. (We won nothing in it, though. The old supporter's superstition dies hard.)
It's the Premiership I really dislike. I hate the hype, the money, the cultral poverty, the bling. It's showbiz, really, and so Platini et al are missing the point when they decry the lack of English talent. When the FA created the Premiership/ Premier League and Sky pumped all that money in, what we have now was an inevitability. The EPL is probably 'the most exciting league' in the world: but it's much more like the IPL, the Indian Premier League 20/20 cricket circus, than anyone would want us to believe. It's razzmatazz, spectacle, Prime Time: and it has very little to do with English players. For as we know by looking at the England team, English players are NOT the best in the world.
I'll be supporting Turkey at Euro 2008, by the way.
So, I'm still in limbo. My love for the Arsenal refuses to die, but I despise the league they play in. Can Arsenal secede and play in La Liga, please?

A History of the Tortoise Head, part 4

I walked into Ed's billiard room with the guitar I had bought from him, and no amplifier. Rich Laxton was there, his guitar (a Stratocaster) plugged into the PA, which was a 'head' and two large cabinets/ speakers. TNS was finished, and I'd kind of invited myself to come and play. I plugged in and we 'jammed' a bit. Ed, I think, played the tambourine.
This was the first time I'd played music with anyone, a nervy first date with new partners. It was a relief to find out that they didn't mind if I wasn't a very good player, that I was in fact pretty bad; they weren't too hot themselves.
But it was the buzz (rather than the fuzzbox), the counterpoint and the raw noise you can make with two players (even better when you add drums and bass), the interaction and interconnection with even the most rudimentary techniques, which addicted me to the experience of being in the band.
'Jamming Me', sang Tom Petty (on a track from the Let Me Up album), over and over on a compliation tape. And that's what Tortoise Head did. We jammed, and it jammed me, jazzed me, thrilled me. There's nothing quite like playing music with your mates, and still I miss it very much.

Why I am giving up the Arsenal, part 5

Today I was able to watch the last 15 minutes of the Arsenal-Everton match, Arsenal's penultimate match of the season. In fact, I turned on the tv just as the Bendtner header hit the back of the net.
I see this as a small step on my road to recovery. The metaphor has changed: this isn't a divorce from the Arsenal, or a trial separation; I've been forcing myself to go cold turkey, to forge a different relationship with the team and the club. It's beginning to work. I no longer need to deny the Arsenal, but they don't retain the power over me that they did. It feels a whole lot healthier.
I read in the online Guardian today a piece about Florent Sinama-Pongolle, once a young French world-beater who was signed by Gerard Houllier's Liverpool (in emulation of Arsene's youth policy), who never made it there but who subsequently left for Spain and has carved out a decent career at, I think, Real Zaragoza. In last night's match, Pongolle was racially abused by Atletico Madrid fans. (As a by-the-way, Atletico's ground, the Vincente Calderon, is the only Spanish football ground I've been to. I saw Atletico lose to Celta Vigo there about 10 years ago. My Spanish is rudimentary, but you couldn't miss the vitriolic abuse aimed at the then Atletico coach, who I think was Claudio Ranieri. Not surprising, really: Atletico were rubbish.)
The abuse suffered by Pongolle made me think of the very real advances made in the English game to eradicate racism which, particularly in the stands (and the fans must take some of the praise for this) is much better than it was in the 1970s or 1980s. Watching a West Brom match from the late 70s on ESPN Classic, the post-match interview with then-manager Ron Atkinson revealed his dim-witted 'praise' of Cyrille Regis's and Laurie Cunningham's efforts along the lines of 'they were a credit to their race'; and this was a man whose elevation of the 'Three Degrees' (the other being Brendon Batson, who West Brom converted from an ordinary Arsenal midfielder to a very classy full back) was markedly progressive for the time, and whose later spell at Aston Villa was characterised by the number and quality of Black British and overseas players in the squad.
Arsenal have a long tradition now of Black British youth players who make the first-team squad. Among the first was Paul Davis. Bizarrely, he first registered with me when I watched (green with envy) an episode of Jim'll Fix It in the early 1980s, when Jimmy Saville arranged for a young lad to play a 10-minute mock game with Arsenal players - at Highbury! Paul Davis was one of those players.
He would be central to George Graham's Arsenal; strangely enough, as he was not a power-running midfielder like Michael Thomas or an all-energy wide player like the late David 'Rocky' Rocastle. Paul Davis was elegant, a thoughtful passer, a player without ego or flashiness, a player who would have fitted in perfectly with Arsene Wenger's teams. He provided the 'cultured' midfield play that separated George's Arsenal from other long-ball teams of the time, but his lack of ego, his ability to be the team hub, meant that he was never in the England reckoning. Like another excellent passing midfielder of the same period, Everton's Paul Bracewell, his very qualities left him overlooked. Any England team of the late 80s or early 90s would have been improved by Davis's presence; think of how bad Graham Taylor's England was. (Compare him to workaday players like Geoff Thomas, or Carlton Palmer.)In the 1991 season, when Arsenal played Tottenham at Highbury, Davis had tyro Paul Gascoigne in the opposition midfield. Not only did Paul Davis put Gascoigne in his pocket that day, marking him out of the game, he then went on to outplay and outpass his opponent. Arsenal won on the way to the title.
Sometimes it's metnioned that Paul Davis spent a long part of one season banned for an incident caught on television, but missed by the referee. Playing Southampton, he punched and broke the jaw of Glenn Cockerill, a mouthy (if skilled) midfielder. For Paul Davis, not exactly fiery of temeperament, to have done that, one can only surmise that the preceding 90 or so minutes had been full of abuse, niggling fouls, and, perhaps, even racism. Only the two of them know that for sure. But I was shocked when I saw the punch. A punch? Paul Davis?
He also scored one of greatest goals I have ever seen watching the Arsenal at Highbury. It was in the run-in to the 1989 championship season, a home game in March 1989 against Charlton. It was in the week of my birthday, so me, Ed and my very good friend Simon all went to see a midweek evening game. (This would have been the Easter vacation.) The game ended 2-2, and it was one of several times that Spring where we thought the Arsenal had blown it. (The later 1-0 home defeat to Derby, right at the end of the season, was the last and worst of these, and seemed to confirm Liverpool's title.) But, defending a corner, Arsenal broke away down the left. We were in the West Stand, as usual, watching, climbing to our feet, as Paul Davis sprinted towards the Clock End to support the break. Over came the cross, and Davis flung himself full length, a spectacular diving header, all the more stunning for its singularity: unlike Michael Thomas, who surged through oppsing defences regularly to score, Davis was not a prolific scorer. But this goal epitomised him: skill, drive, and total commitment to the Arsenal cause.
It seems now that Arsenal will lose Matthieu Flamini and Aleksandr Hleb to AC Milan and Inter Milan respectively this summer. Paul Davis was a one-club man, a wonderful and perhaps neglected footballer. How the Arsenal could do with a player of his skill, intelligence and commitment next season.

A History of the Tortoise Head, part 3

Looking back, the mixtape was a crucial element in our little culture that formed the hinterland to Tortoise Head. In about 1987, Lee bought a car, a Ford Cortina, in which Lee, Ed, Rich and myself went to Stithians in Cornwall for a week's holiday, in the summer before we went to University. In the car played Ed's Compilation tapes, a series which extended, I think, well into the teens before they were discontinued. The Compilation tape series were what would be known now as mixtapes, audio cassettes Ed made with his record collection on his Dad's Technics midi stereo, which sat next to the Betamax in Ed's front room. Only now do I realise that we were a disconnected part of the whole mixtape culture that took place in the 1980s, that has ended with the rise of the hegemon iPod and the switch from analogue to digital.
Ed was a purist with regard to mixtapes. He would only record on TDK D90s, the bottom end of the market - no Metal Oxide or Dolby 'high' for him. (Ed's purism in this regard extended into the Noughties. When I sent him a mix CD of stuff a few years ago, he responded with a batch of 4 TDK SA90s - I barely had anything to play them on.) This DIY ethic was a kind of samizdat publication, a way of disseminating his own pop cultural preferences among his friends. Staples of the early Compilations were the Ramones (especially Rocket to Russia and Road to Ruin), early ZZ Top, Motorhead, Black Sabbath of course, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Ed had a thing at the time of Southern Accents where he would call anything cool 'Southern') and now-disavowable 1980s rock anthems as Bryan Adams's 'The Boys of Summer'. (Most appropriately for this time, this begins: 'Got my first six-string/ Bought it at the five-and-dime'.) Except for The Damned, Ed's punk sensibilities were definitely American rather than British, whereas my first love had been The Jam, and had been a Mod, so was steeped in The Who and The Kinks and that snotty English mode.
Compilation 4 was the defining document: Ed had seen The Cult playing 'Love Removal Machine' on tv, and had fallen in love with its Deep Purple riffs/ rip-offs and half-ironic 'stoopid', Neanderthal rock. (The album was, of course, produced by Rick Rubin of Def Jam and Def American, but Ed ignored the hip-hop connection. Ed was also into Aerosmith but again blanked 'Walk this Way'.) So the majority of Electric found its way onto mixtapes, and the subsequent Sonic Temple (renamed Chronic Temple) did as well. For me, The Cult were always a guilty pleasure.
The Compilation tapes were a set of signposts to the kind of music Ed wanted to make in TNS and Tortoise Head, and his vocal delivery became inflected through an ironic take on Ian Astbury's own stylised rock-god pastiche. I brought the Stones, classic English rock like The Who, indie noise-rock like The Jesus and Mary Chain and the Huskers, and of course the Pixies to the table.
Tortoise Head. File under: 'beat rock combo'.

Why I am giving up the Arsenal, no.4

After Eduardo's leg was broken in that reckless, horrendous moment in the Birmingham match, I texted fellow gooner Arthur and wrote: 'Today is the end of Eduardo's career, and Arsenal's season'. I hope I'm to be proved wrong about the former; I was right about the latter. What truly nauseated me about that day was Sky's sanctimonious decision not to show the incident again to save the sensibilities of the viewers, who all must have scuttled to their computers to download still images from the Internet instead. Richard Keys and, I think, David Platt (who seems to bear an unconscious grudge against the Arsenal, even though we provided him with his highest honours in 1998, when he retired after the team that had just won the Double) blathered on and on about how William Gallas had let the team down, how Arsenal's lack of 'bottle'/ backbone/ toughness had caught up with them. The same line was repeated by Alan Hansen on Match of the Day, when even the supine/ anodyne Gary Lineker felt it necessary to stress the horrific nature of the physical injury to Eduardo's leg, and the emotional effect this had clearly had on a young team and a volatile captain.
Keys, Platt and Hansen unconsciously replicated the very rhetoric about Arsenal's inability to 'take' physical confrontation that led, I feel, ultimately to Taylor's challenge. In retrospect, I do not think Taylor intended to break Eduardo's leg, or even intended to put him out of the match, but I do think it was meant to hurt, meant to give Eduardo pause in the next challenge, meant to 'find him out' physically. Taylor's assault (I first wrote 'challenge' but this is inadequate) was the logical end-point of the escalating attempts of teams, up to and including Manchester United, to 'stop Arsenal playing'. (This has happened for a long time, of course; with Vieira and Petit in midfield, though, this physicality often resulted in red cards, largely for our players, in retaliation. It's worthy of note that the endless media carping about Arsenal's disciplinary record has now been replaced by the assertion that Arsenal 'don't like it up 'em', as the Arsenal players react less aggressively.) Wenger himself argued this in post-match interviews, but it was lost in the furore about his call for Taylor to be banned indefinitely. Eduardo's injury was bound to happen to an Arsenal player sooner or later. And in fact it already had, to Abou Diaby against Sunderland two seasons before, against a team already relegated.
I was shocked by what happened to Eduardo, shocked by the way it was handled by Sky and the BBC, and this isn't just a cliche: the 'shock' made me feel differently about the sport, and about Arsenal. To see this young man's leg broken so badly, his foot nearly taken off by a physical assault, made me feel it wasn't worth following football any more, if a player of such skill and finesse could be brutalised in this way. Arsene has become paranoid about refereeing decisions, penatlties not given, as the Arsenal have slipped out of Champions League and Premier League running; but I would rather he kept talking about the way skilful players are not protected as they should be, in an English footballing culture which still prizes physicality over technique. And for evidence of that, watch any of England's games over the last 5 years. From Eduardo to England's failure to qualify for Euro '08: only connect.

A History of the Tortoise Head, part 2

I bought a steel-string acoustic from a classified ad in the Evening Echo and my dad took me there in the car to get it. £5. It was made by Boosey and Hawkes, who mainly maufactured orchestral instruments. It had a high, high bridge and an action so high that after 5 minutes of playing you developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in your left wrist. (CTS, not TNS.) It hadn't been played since the time of Wat Tyler, or at least The New Seekers. I took some of the strings off and took them down to a music shop to see what kind of strings I needed. Wound in a circle, they looked like bailing wire. The assistant in the shop looked somewhat startled by what I showed him, then sold me a packet of Rotosound 10s. Something for the weekend.
I got a book out of the local library that showed me chord shapes, and was soon strumming Es and As and Ds. I tuned the guitar using an old Casio keyboard I'd been given for Christmas some years before. I think now I must have tuned it an octave too high, because one day, while playing, I knocked the neck against the edge of a table and the head snapped clean off. In the 1980s, Roland had a line of headless bass guitars (Curt Smith from Tears for Fears played one) but this was ridiculous. Ever the stalwart, my dad fixed the head back on with some kind of wood glue, and by God, it worked! It was always just slightly crooked, though, so not really to be trusted.
Something had to happen. A broken steel-string acoustic wasn't very rock and roll. Fortunately, I knew Ed Hill.
Ed and I were in the same group for English for A level, at SEEVIC (the South East Essex VIth Form College). I'd known him a little at King John, our secondary school, but I was really a part of the football-playing crowd, and Ed wasn't. We became good friends at SEEVIC. Ed drove in from Leigh-on-Sea on a 50cc motorbike, for some reason, and always had the helmet under his arm when entering the class. He also wore donkey jackets, and one of these jackets, for a reason I was to find out later, lived up to its name in an olfactory sense. It gave Ed a rather eccentric, almost Beat kind of persona - a development of his King John character, 'Ed Banger', as Ed was a metaller.
(I had been, for a few years, a Mod. I loved The Who, and still do. I had had a couple of coversations with Ed at school about music, where I complained about metal's 'raucousness'. He pointed out to me, quite rightly, that was was John Entwhistle's bass playing, if not 'raucous'? This was the very early stage of my entry into the world of metal, as guided by Ed. He wasn't a true believer, though - he called the Metal style mag 'Kerrap' rather than Kerrang!, so I knew irony was in there somewhere.)
I scraped together some cash and bought the Honky Tonk guitar Ed had received for his time on the Hadleigh pavement - Ed had picked up a Strat copy and that was easier to play. So I went from CTS-inducing acoustic to a semi-acoustic electric guitar whose action was only marginally more forgiving. At least it made enough of a sound, as a hollow-bodied electric guitar, that I didn't need an amp straight away. Just as well. I couldn't afford one.