A&R Lament
I’m the singer with the Psychedelic Cow Pats.
Some of you may recognise the mug.
Cos before that we were called the Steaming Bath Mats
(I think dear old Bath deserves a little plug.)
But the West is like the music world’s left armpit,
And we’re not exactly earning Queen-like fees,
Cos in Axminster they pay us off in carpets,
While in Cheddar they just let you gorge on cheese.
Once we tried to get ourselves a proper sponsor,
Some big agent from artistes and repertoire,
So we sent off this cassette of our last concert
With a tenner and a gallon cider jar.
But the bloke from A&R he seemed to lack sense,
He was really thick and denser than a log.
For a start, he couldn’t understand our accents,
And he thought Wootton Bassett was a type of dog.
Then just when our dole-queue dough was getting shorter –
We were gigging in this scout hut what we’d loaned –
The local paper sent along a rock reporter,
Though he turned up looking more like he was stoned.
When the fuses blew he sat and looked moronic,
Then he said “I say, you chaps must have a short.”
I replied “Yes please, a double gin and tonic.”
And he went away and wrote a bad report.
Next we went into St Paul’s to do this demo –
When they let us out on bail, we made a tape.
And we travelled up to London in this limo
Feeling flash, drinking beer and smoking crepe.
But the problems started when we tried to park it,
And this big producer narked us when he said,
“You don’t fill a gap in any present market.”
So we made a gap between his teeth instead.
Then we heard about this place the moguls looked in –
Some big attic in a pub off Soho Square –
And eventually we got ourselves a booking
With twenty other rock bands on the stairs.
As a debut we thought it was really striking,
But the A&R men there were proper twits.
One explained the reason we weren’t to his liking,
He was into Dolly Parton’s greatest’its.
So the problem still is how to get in contact
With these record labels feathering their nests.
All we want is one small million-dollar contract
And a coupla groupies hanging off our chests.
If we look depressed you shouldn’t really blame us,
It’s not just because L.P.s cost five pounds ten,
For not only are we not yet rich and famous,
Bloody Bristol City went and lost again.
1980
PS
This was my first ever professional song commission, it went out on our local BBC TV region in 1980, and the memory of it still gives me nightmares.
RPM was a cheap and cheerful little magazine programme which shone a weekly spotlight on the area’s arts scene. This included music. I had a few numbers still knocking around from my university revue days, so I’d sent a tape of these on spec to the producer, politely wondering if he might be able to use any of them, pretty safe in the conviction he would reject them out of hand as the amateurish caterwaulings of a jumped-up jackanapes, but at least I’d had a go and you couldn’t blame a chap for trying.
Bastard called my bluff.
He quickly got back to me to say they happened to be doing an item on record companies’ A&R departments that week and could I write a humorous song all about the difficulties local bands faced in cracking that elusive London-centric market? Suddenly here was my chance to emulate my idol Jake Thackray (see ‘Together’), the saturnine genius songwriter off Esther Rantzen programmes, who each week would write and perform a droll but erudite number poking sly but witty fun at a subject examined earlier in the show. “I’ll try,” I croaked, no doubt immediately sewing in the producer’s mind the seeds of doubt which were to blossom into full throbbing bloom later that week.
I rarely have it in me to physically throw away anything I’ve written, so my files still contain the five or six sheets of notes charting my thought processes over those tortured few days.
First there were the inevitable time-wasting throat-clearings where I jotted down notes about what I thought A&R people did. Pete Atkin, who wrote all those fabulous albums with Clive James, had actually written a musical play called A&R which I had seen last time I was in Edinburgh doing the Fringe, so I knew the initials stood for ‘artists and repertoire’, and these were the people in charge of finding and encouraging promising new talent. So my first thought was to scribble down a list of phrases that A&R could stand for – things like, arrant rip-off, aesthetically rancid, absolute rubbish, anti-reggae – which got me precisely nowhere.
But this gradually evolved into a first-person monologue from the POV of an actual A&R man:
I’m a big successful bleeder and I work in A & R,
Which is record label jargon for Artistes and Repertoire,
And I keep a chrome cassette deck in my flash Mercedes car
Where I listen to these tapes from bands that come from near and far.
But –
They always sound the same
And I can never remember their names
And it’s really such a shame
They’re all stuck just where they are.
But this fizzled out, not least because this person was hardly the most sympathetic character in the equation. Plus, I was wasting precious gag time – people would already know what A&R stood for because they would have seen it in the preceding item that my song was designed to humorously illustrate. Also, I had as yet no tune, and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to tackle that double-shuffle rhythm change in the middle of the verse. Plus near and far is so appallingly weak that it can only be there as a make-weight to fit the rhyme scheme, and the plural names doesn’t rhyme with same and shame, not to mention the presence of that just, which is always an indication you just haven’t got enough ideas to pack out the line properly, so this was another blind alley. So much for aspiring to be the next Jake Thackray. I wasn’t even Alan Jay Lerner. Hell, I wasn’t even Ray Davies – count the number of times he insists on placing the stress on the wrong syllable, even in something as peerlessly atmospheric as his masterpiece ‘Waterloo Sunset’:
Dirty old river, must you keep rolling,
Flowing into the night…
Anyway, by now I’d wasted over half a day and the producer was expecting to see something the following morning. I was seriously thinking of ringing him back to let him down when something finally clicked. As is so often the way, once you’ve been all round the houses, the only route left is the obvious one, straight up the front path, and I realised I needed to write it in the indignant and frustrated voice of a band member looking for a way in. The first draft eventually went something like this:
So we wrote off to this A&R man’s office
Which is jargon for Artistes and Repertoire
(Something ending in iss)
And he telephoned us from his big flash car.
He said he couldn’t understand our accents.
He thought Wootten Basset was a sort of sheep.
(Something something -ence or -ance)
What a lousy stinking rotten no-good creep.
Lots of work to be done, too angry by half, but I needed to blow off steam to clear my head. And the rumpty-dumpty rhythm immediately suggested a sort of tune that I could comfortably play (and just about sing) in my reliable key of C major. (Proper musos always seem to specify whether the key is major or minor; I suppose it must mean something to them.) I was even able to get a bit of peril into the fifth and sixth lines where the change of chord from D minor down to A minor (always slightly minatory to my ear) managed to echo the sentiments of the lines that were being sung over them – a rare moment of musical sophistication for me, though I do say so myself.
There was no warm overwhelming sense of relief; I had been too rattled by my near failure to feel anything but nervous exhaustion. But once I’d got this far, the rest of the song wrote itself pretty quickly. I read the lyrics over the phone to the producer in the morning – best West Country accent for full comic effect, once you’ve been brought up with one it never fully leaves you, disguise it as you might – and he seemed happy. All I had to do now was learn the bloody thing.
Or not.
Can I say a word about forgetting your words? Things which are well written are always easier to remember than their opposite. I’ve only ever frozen on stage twice, and the first time it was mainly due to the part being so poorly constructed that there was no internal logic to the words, no through-line of thought to carry the idea from the start of the utterance to the end. (The other time I forgot I simply wasn’t concentrating.) And it can happen to the best of us – hell, I even saw Jake himself once forget a verse in Oxford. I could have got up on stage beside him and sung the rest of the song through for him (sure, I know his stuff off by heart, I used to do him at college folk clubs) – so there’s no shame in it, and given the circumstances, the only surprising thing is that it doesn’t happen more often. Except that when you’re singing a song – a song you’ve only bloody written yourself the day before – it’s somehow worse. Not that it should be. You’re sat there trying to play some damn instrument at the same time, using all your fingers (which are probably shivering with nerves and slippery with sweat), and they’re expecting you to remember a whole bunch of words at the same time? Sod ’em. They’re lucky you turned up at all.
That’s the commonsense attitude, of course, the one you only ever recall in tranquillity, once it’s all over. In the moment, however, there is no escaping the ghastly overwhelming sensation of vulnerability and exposure, the burning cheeks and the bursting bladder, the howling, hooting, haunting, stark naked shame of it all.
The weird thing is, it doesn’t matter if you wrote the poxy lyrics in the first place, you still (or rather, I always found I still) had to sit down and learn them. Poets are good at it, they always seem to be able to reel off an entire sonnet sequence just like that if you give them half a chance, probably because they’ve spent so many hours agonising over every single syllable. Familiarity is obviously the key; which of us can’t sing along word-perfectly to all our favourite Beatles tracks, or Abba, or Elton John, or whoever it was we happened to grow up with? (Maybe not Elton John so much, I find his delivery so mannered as to be virtually incomprehensible; to this day I haven’t a clue what ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ is all about, and I’m told there is a reference in ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ to some kind of armoured amphibian, but I’ve never been able to identify it amid Mr Dwight’s unique vocal stylings. And don’t get me started on Adele. Remember her Bond theme? Let the ska fowoo When it crumbowooz… Enunciate, woman!)
Experience has shown me that in performance, there is always so much to do, so much to think about, that the only way to avoid, or at least reduce, the risk of disaster and embarrassment is to leave at least one of the procedures to muscle memory so you can concentrate on the things that most need your conscious attention. In the case of songs, despite being more a words man than a musician, I invariably find my fingers learn the chords much more quickly and surely than my brain does the words, so once up on stage it was always the vocals I would invariably find myself consciously thinking about. This was surely the right way round anyway, because since I was no great shakes as a guitarist, I thought I could at least put a bit of expression into the words.
And this is fine when you’ve got all the time in the world to learn a song, but in the case of ‘A&R Lament’ I think I had no more than a day between commission and recording, so obviously I had no chance. My first appearance on TV proved even more nerve-wracking than all the subsequent quiz shows which was completely the wrong way round logically; in quiz shows, you haven’t got a clue what they’re going to ask and you don’t want to look a fool getting even the simple ones wrong. In performance, on the other hand, you should expect to be at least a little bit ahead of the game; you’ve learnt the lines and the moves, you’re supposed to know what’s going to happen moment to moment, so theoretically you should have no call to be nervous. But if you haven’t had time to get on top of the material, you’re fucked.
Which is what I secretly knew I was as I nervously humped my guitar into the BBC studios in Whiteladies Road, Bristol one sleety night early in 1980. They sit me on a stool in a small, cold studio – all those lights and it’s still as chilly as a tomb – and the camera slides in to halt a yard in front of my sound hole. Out of the corner of my eye I can even see myself on a monitor, God help me, my thigh so rigid with nerves that it’s visibly jumping. Someone up in the gallery says Go or something. I don’t know anymore. I certainly didn’t care then.
I started half a dozen times and never got more than two verses in before cocking it up.
Anyone who has had to stand up in front of an audience and give a performance of any kind – whether acting or singing, making a speech, giving a lecture, reading sales figures or delivering a PowerPoint presentation – will know that feeling. It’s stupid of course. People will generally understand – mostly they’re all thinking, thank Christ it’s not me up there. But in a TV studio where time is money and everyone is meant to be professional, you haven’t got that luxury. And as the person in the spotlight, you feel a unique failure. I was better than this, I knew I was, but I’d let everybody down. I’d let myself down. How dare I presume to waste the time of a bunch of skilled and highly-paid strangers in such a shitty, shoddy manner?
They were very patient with me in the control booth but with each retake I could tell tension was mounting. The clock ticked toward 9:45, and I knew we had to get this in the can by ten, which didn’t help. In the end – and I don’t know why somebody hadn’t thought of this sooner – I was allowed to tape the lyric sheet to the microphone stand and simply read the bloody things out, strumming along on the faithful old jumbo and glancing occasionally into the camera lens with, as I recall, my best look of shy winsomeness perfected from all those years opening the batting at my college folk club. Did it in one take. And on the night of transmission I found the splendid presenter Andy Batten-Foster had simply added a half-line to his introduction to explain my amateurishness: “And now here’s local boy Robin Seavill with a song hot off the typewriter.”
That was all it took. And why not? People know things need to be written, in a weekly magazine show they probably understand contributors may not always have the time they would like to get fully prepared, and as far as I know, nobody wrote in to complain. So I’m sorry, but I’m going to chalk that up as a success.
The producer even drove me home afterwards and we talked enthusiastically about possibly working together again. I don’t think he was being conventionally polite either, and I knew in my bones it would be better next time, if only because it couldn’t possibly be any worse. But in the end he went off around the world making cookery programmes with the wonderfully flamboyant chef Keith Floyd and I never saw him again. And I don’t blame him one bit. It’s what I’d have done in his position.
As for ‘A&R Lament’, I could no longer sing the song right through now any more than I could then. Others, yes: this one, nope. But I remember watching the programme with my mother the night it went out, and her heartfelt verdict: “Very good, dear.” It was the one and only time she ever got to see her little boy perform on the telly. I got better, Mum. Really I did.