Many years ago, my sister had a flat in Canfield Gardens, in West Hampstead. She had a flatmate, who was a sound engineer. He may have been called Craig or I may have imagined that. He wasn't very chatty, but one day I was having a casual conversation with him and he told me a rather odd story. Apparently Bob Marley had been mixing tracks at a studio near Willesden. As was the way, back in the day, after the session, the artist and their representatives would take the master tapes away for safekeeping. The band went off and found a pub to wind down. They then went to a few more pubs. Marley was a Rastafarian ad reputedly didn't drink, but some of the pubs in the locality had a relatively lax policy in regards to smoking of ganja at the time. Anyway, as the evening progressed, the band ran out of cash. Pubs didn't take cards back then. To secure further libation, the band offered the Landlord of the pub the master tapes as security against their bar tab. They carried on the evening, making their way back to their dwellings at the end of a long, celebratory night.
When they woke up in the morning, none of them could remember which pub they'd left the tapes in. A frantic search of the area was fruitless. Somewhere, a Pub landlord had a set of Bob Marley master tapes, worth millions, and they didn't kow where. The story seemed implausable for many reasons and I dismissed it at the time. Then in 2017, the tapes turned up. Finding lost recordings of a legend like Marley is always an event of note. As a fan, we always dream of 'lost recordings' turning up. Usually when they do, the reason they were lost is apparent, but the Marley tapes are actually pretty good. Unlike most 'lost tapes', the tapes were genuinely lost, they were not just out takes.
This was brought to mind yesterday when I was in studio reception. A chap, who I didn't recognise walked in. He looked like a musician. He asked if I was Roger and if I played in a band called The False Dots. This happens from time to time. He then told me he'd seen a post I'd put on Facebook, about a gig the band played on June 30th 1984. It was a benefit gig for Greenham Common peace camp, rather incongrously at The Bald Faced Stag in Burnt Oak. We played with a band called "No Biscuits". He had been the drummer of the band, who were a rather good Rythme and Blues band. The gig organiser was a chap called Tony Byrne. Tony arranged for the gig to be video'd. This was a big thing at the time, but sadly I never actually got to see the video. We had a Betamax and Tony recorded it on VHS. To my astonishment, the chap informed me he had a copy and could get me a copy too.
Now this is not on the scale of the Marley tapes, but for me personally it is a massive thing. Venessa Sagoe was our singer at the time. She was truly amazing. Often these videos have poor sound quality and are badly filmed, but several of my friends, including our bassplayer Paul Hircombe have passed away and the thought of seeing myself at age 22 will be interesting. I am also intrigued as to what songs we performed. I am pretty sure that the only number we perform from those days is Action Shock, albiet a very different version.
Last year, a tape of our very first gig in 1980 turned up, courtesy of our old drummer Dav Davies. I was surprised at how good it was. It isn't the Rolling Stones, but it was perfectly acceptible and I used some of the songs for social media postings, which was fun. For a band like us, I suspect such things are only really of interest to us and a few mates. Some of the footage may see the light of day on social media etc, and a few locals may check it out, out of curiosity. In actual fact, there is a lot of nostalgia for the 'old Burnt Oak', so if there is enough usable footage, I may well hack something together.
One of the interesting things about getting old, is that I take a completely different view of the bands old material. When we were teenagers, starting out, we wrote a lot of material, that we decided was rubbish. We dumped it all. I've revisited a fair amount of it recently and I realised that I just lacked the patience, technical ability and wherewithall to develop some of the ideas. At reecent gigs, we've been playing a song called Wrong, which was the first song we ever learned as a band. It has gone down a storm and will feature on our next album, in its newly recorded glory, with Tom Hammond singing.
The only real sadness is that legends like Bob Marley didn't live long enough to revisit his lost material. But don't despair, here's a short clip from the False Dots 'lost' first gig tape!
No comments:
Post a Comment