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...