The best stories are journeys. So hopefully this installment will be a good one! It is the journey of what inspired me to put pen to paper and write the songs that The False Dots perform. I've touched on this several times but never properly charted the journey. So take yourself back to early 1978 if you can remember it, and if you can't, let your imagination do the work. The False Dots, as a band were still a year away from our first formation. I was a snotty nosed 15 year old at Finchley Catholic High School. I had discovered Punk rock the previous year and was lapping it up. I had a mate at School, Pete Conway, who was like minded and we decided that we needed to form a band. We couldn't play, we had no instruments and we had no idea where to start. At the time, our big influence was The Clash and their first album. We had some vague idea that we should play Garageland as we wanted to be a Garage band. The aim was to sound a bit like The Clash. Pete came up with a brilliant idea. Rather than try and copy songs, we'd write our own. As we were both completely lacking in any clue as to how music is put together, this was not the best way to 'learn the ropes'. I had a book by Bert Weedon called Play in a day, which my brother, a decent guitarist, bequeathed to me. It had songs like "When the Saints go marching in" and "The Old Folks at Home" in. Pete observed that we just had to jumble the chords up and play them quicker. It seemed like a plan. To my horror, playing the guitar was much harder than I thought and I had no aptitude for it at first.
In May, Pete took a radical deicision. He quit school and got a job at Dewhursts as a butcher. This would pay for a bass and a bass amp. When I was sixteen, I was coming into a bit of cash from my child modelling career. To my mums horror, I bought a Hofner Galaxy and a Selmer guitar amp. By January 1979, we were making a right old racket in my bedroom every night. We'd written a bunch of songs, more or less randomly picking chords out and hollering slogans over the top. By this time, the Pete and I had discovered Crass. It is fair to say they were a massive influence. They were far less musical than The Clash and far more political. There was one thing though, that they bequeathed that was a massive positive. Crass were amazing at coming up with catchy slogans "fight war, not wars", "Do they owe us a living, of course they do" were just a couple of examples. Our best song of this era was definitely "Wrong" which we are reprising on our new album. It is 45 seconds of sheer punkyness.
By September 1979, my obsession with Crass and the first iteration of the False Dots was done. I had discovered The Specials, Two Tone and Ska. This was what I wanted to do, but we didn't know any brass players. It was also more tuneful and required a much better drummer than we had access to. Pete wrote a Reggae song called "Kingston Rock", which in truth was not very good. He was more into Dub reggae. It was neither.
We did however get a brilliant drummer in 1980. Mr Dav Davies. Sadly, he came in to a set full of punky songs. The time was febrile, huge amounts of musical energby flowed through London. We experimented. We tried our luck with electronic music, influenced by Gary Numan and also started to lean sound wise towards the more tuneful end of The Velvet Underground catalogue. Pete was keen that we be shocking and cover subjects that sane bands of the day would avoid like the plague. I loved the way The Velvet Underground put sugary melody on bitter lyrics. Songs like Not all She Seems from our last album date from then, deals with the issue of the social exclusion of gender fluid sex workers. Not all of these numbers have aged as well.
When Pete left in September 1980, I found myself writing songs on my own. I also had freedom to arrange songs as I saw fit. Craig Withecombe, an excellent guitarist joined and we started gigging. With competent musicians, the songs sounded pretty good and I was inspired to write more, but I struggled to be inspired in the way Crass had originally inspired us. I made the biggest mistake that a songwriter can make. I thought if I made the songs complicated, they would be better, they weren't. Oddly, I wrote a couple of great songs by accident. The best, also on our last album, was Action Shock. This was inspired by the protest songs of Country Joe McDonald. It was my attempt to recreate a punk version of the classic anti war song "I feel like I'm Fixing to Die" around the Falklands War. It worked because it was simple. Dav departed and Mark Barnett joined. He was less capable technically, but he kept the show on the road. We experimented with a reggae song, christened "FalseDub" by a Rasta mate.
By 1985, I realised I needed to up my game. I enrolled in a songwriting course. I believe if I'd done this in 1978, we'd have had hits! It was brilliant, I learned how to structure music properly, but also the importance of what you put together being functional. I also came to understand that song lyrics work better with trigger words and reinforcement of concepts, so that the lyrics can be layered over the music to paint patterns. I also realised the power of what Crass had taught us. Strong lyrics that you remember.
I had long been a fan of Ian Dury, but it never occurred to me that The False Dots could borrow from him lyrically or from the Blockheads muscially. By the late 1980's I had gotten more into groovy and funky vibes. I loved the Run DMC Walk this Way cover. It seemed to me to be the way to go. When Tony Robotham, a very talented singer joined the band, I thought we could nail it, but the industry had changed and it was almost impossible for us to even get gigs, with the feel we had. It was a real shame.
Dispirited I stopped playing. In around 2000, I decided to get a band together to record a few of the old numbers, now I had a recording studio, purely for my own pleasure. I found I enjoyed playing, but did not consider writing any new material. Out of nowehere in 2006, I got the urge to write again. The inspiration was quite odd. I was watching the classic TV cop series "Life on Mars" when a few sentences spoken by a character triggered me. I wrote a song called "I'm the man" AKA "Pusherman". I just wanted to write a sort Stooges style punk song, written from the viewpoint of a psychopathic drug dealer. I hasten to add I am not one, but I enjoy constructing storyboards for songs and videos in my head when I am inspired. It worked. In some ways it was a bit of an evolutionary blind alley. In 2009. Connie Abbe joned the band. Connie is a brilliant Sudanese singer and rapper.
All of a sudden, I had the band I wanted. We could rock, skank, rap and groove. To get my head around what Connie wanted, I immersed myself in Rap music and found it really inspiring. We wrote tracks like "Put me in the Spotlight" which I think was a masterpiece and is the most listened to False Dots track ever. It was used for the Goal of the Month show on the Man City website and had over 47 million plays! Sadly we got almost nothing, but it was a kick.
Sadly Connie went to pastures new. As part of the Library campaign I was involved in, The False Dots got asked to play at Friern Barnet Library, to celebrate the saving of the library. I got the 1985 line up of the band together, with Poet Allen Ashley on vocals. It seemed fitting as Allen is a poet and author. As often happens when you collaborate, your influences are suppressed. I enjoyed the line up, Allen is a great lyricist, but it wasn't particularly the direction I wanted to go in.
When the band emerged from Covid, Allen was not available. I am mates with Lee Thompson of Madness and wrote a song called "Longshot didn't die" with the idea of him performing it with us. I played a rough version to Lee. He said "It sounds great, why not sing it yourself". It was the kick I needed. In short, it worked. I had worked on the song with Allen, with him contributing lyrics, but it was very much the start of the new Dots era. I realised that I'd spent 40 years skirting around the fact that what I really wanted to do was a mash up of The Specials and Ian Dury. I love Dury's narrative style and I love everything about The Specials, but not least the fact that their views align with me.
So I started writing songs for me, to be sung by me and in an manner that is both witty and to the point. Then Tom Hammond joined in trumpet. The missing piece of the jigsaw. Now we were able to bring the ideas to life. Tom can also sing, so it has given us the option to do material that would simply not work with me singing. I revisted a couple of old songs. As mentioned earlier, we reprised Wrong as a nod to our roots. Another highlight is Electric Ballroom, as song originally called Reality Ballroom. I completely rewrote the lyrics when Pete Conway left the band. We now give it a semi psyche rock makeover. It sounds great. And then there is the silliness. Songs like Big Hairy Spider, our recent single. Musically, it is somewhere between The Clash and The Specials. Lyrically, it is actually inspired by horror comics of the 1960's. It has been a long journey, but there are elements of every stage on our forthcoming album.
What I've learned is that you don't need to search for inspiration, open your eyes and ears and it will hit you over the head. Keep it as simple as you can put put twists and turns on the road in your songs. Big Hairy Spider has a middle 8 that is pure Benny Hill. I like it. Have a listen, and we hope to see you at The 100 Club on Good Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment