Camberwell Now (1982 - 1987)
Trefor Goronwy: bass, guitar, vocals, etc.
Charles Hayward: drums, vocals, etc.
Stephen Rickard: tapes, guitar, etc.
Charles Hayward: "I was from Camberwell. And it's important to me that music which goes 'outside' still has some sort of semi-folk basis in society."
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Sounds
'Daddy Needs A Throne'
'Wheat Futures'
'Spirit Of Dunkirk'
'Greenfingers'
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Testimonial
I love Camberwell Now. Considering their entire recorded output fits on a single CDR, and considering I have been listening to it more or less at least once a week for about three years, that's a lot of time and a lot of love. So I've had a while to think about the love and think I have some idea how not to be dull about it.
I love the music. I love that guitars barely get a look-in. I love that the third member of a trio should operate some byzantine mixing desk stuffed full of found sounds and abstract textures in lieu of a third 'real instrument'. I love that even when they're playing something absurdly fiddly, it's tuneful. I love that just as frequently the absurdly fiddly tunefulness is offset by Charles Hayward singing through clenched teeth, or a barrage of kazoos, or some unnameable grey noise. I love that "Working Nights" opens with the same tape of 10cc-in-Hell sustained voices that "The Ghost Trade" closes with, at the opposite end of the LP.
I love the words. Charles Hayward writes most of the lyrics, many of them pointedly political. I love that while they're often to a certain extent satirical or funny, they aren't at the expense of their subjects. I love that for all its bathos, the core of "Daddy Needs A Throne" is a fierce and uncompromising empathy. I love that the lines are so absurdly long:
at home on a label on a bottle in a cupboard in a kitchen
there's your proof - Daddy on a throne
after a long hard tiring day answering the telephone -
no time for a lunch break - Daddy needs a Mummy to fix his drink
a few square feet of city centre office space that's his domain
and the information therein contained
the furniture and fittings it's his responsibility
when he pops it or when he retires, whichever comes first
it will take a long time to break in the new boy profits will slide
a golden wristwatch a golden handshake at rainbow's end
Or this, from "The Ghost Trade":
all we ever wanted was sanitary plumbing
straight roads and a sense of belonging
to a community of interest that could reasonably call itself 'civilised'
I love the ideas. I love the quote from Charles Hayward I've inserted at the top of this guest day. I love them deciding to displace guitars with a proto-sampler. I love them not waiting for samplers to be readily or easily available and going out to do gigs with a table stacked high with cassette decks instead. I love that the "Meridian" EP is unaccountably fixated with songs about shipping, politics and the English fixation with the sea that manage to be more psychedelic in their absent poise than any set of muppet-stoner recidivists I care to mention. I love that they didn't wait. I love that they did it. I love that it sounds as though it could all have happened last week. I love that they tell me what they think.
I love this answer:
PSF: Is it a problem that there needs to be some kind of alternative to the mainstream and that everything shouldn't sound the same?
Charles Hayward: But there is no alternative. We're all in the same boat. The 'alternative' idea is a lie and so is the 'mainstream' idea. It's all a lie. There is no alternative, there is no mainstream- all there is, is us. We're together here. Everything else has been thrown on top of us. People think "we're like this and they're like that." We've all got to make sure that we can breath clean air. What's the difference? The problem is seeing us in competition. The guy who cleaned my (hotel) room is in the same boat as me.
I haven't included many videos in this piece. Partly because there aren't many posted to YouTube, partly because there are only 15 tracks to select from anyway. Partly because I believe "The Ghost Trade" is absolutely one of the most visionary, self-contained records anyone made in the 1980s and that it deserves to be heard in its own context. But also chiefly because I think this music deserves to be sought out rather than fileshared in a few minutes of watching a progress bar, and that it demands to be heard in contexts beside sitting at a computer. You'll forgive me if I sound stuffy or didactic: I don't have the wit to put my case better.
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Discography
Meridian (1983)
The Ghost Trade (1986)
Greenfingers (1987)
All's Well (1992, re-released 2007) collects all of the above, adding 'Daddy Needs A Throne' from the Touch #5 compilation and a lovely booklet of photographs and articles.
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Further reading, etc
Charles Hayward interviewed at Perfect Sound Forever
Buy "All's Well" from ReR Megacorp
Download "All's Well" from eMusic
Cover scans grabbed from Discogs
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p.s. Hey. Today the brilliant and meticulously tasteful Dreadful Flying Glove would like to have a word with you about the unjustly sidelined band Camberwell Now. While carrying out my duties as blog post maker, I was able to have an early one-on-one with the band and TDFG's interventions, and why they're not more heralded and omnipresent is a head-scratcher to me. See what you think, and then please tell your guest-host what you think, okay? My eternal gratitude goes out to the Glove. It's cleaning/exile day on my end, so I'll be hurrying a bit, and, even so, this post/p.s. is certain to be interrupted any minute and then show up late. Sorry. ** Oscar B, How was the Marais? Did you get caught in the rain? We should confer and see what we're going to do about Mr. Harry Potter, yes? ** David Ehrenstein, 'Guy and Madline on a Park Bench': okay, you bet. I'll peel my eyes for that. Is it French? Haven't heard a peep about it over here yet. Thanks! Great FaBlog on the priestly stuff. Everyone, the eminent David Ehrenstein goes up against some priesthood-related nastiness on ye olde FaBlog. Check it out. ** Bernard Welt, Hm, what did I miss? ** MANCY, Hey, man. I'm glad you thought the post looked okay. It was such a pleasure on my end, and, dare I say it, ours, and I hope all the praise and people's thinking aloud and the experience in general was a good one for you. Exciting to know and show your work, and thanks so much again. ** Michael_karo, Hope that film gets to happen. I just read about that Lennon doc. I'll peruse it, thanks. ** JW Veldhoen, Hey, John. Thanks for the good stuff to MANCY, man. ** Steevee, Hey. Everything I've seen and read about 'The Black Swan' seemed to promise a bunch of pretentious shit, so no surprise, I guess. Aronofsky is pretty much a total wash for me, even 'The Wrestler', which was just a big performance amidst a bunch of hoary cliches to my mind. I'll avoid. Thank you. Have a nice Thanksgiving. ** Pisycaca, Hi, Montse. I'm good. Just work work work. It has gotten quite cold here too. We have some snow in the forecast as well, but I like snow too much to get my hopes up. No, nothing on the Dazed & Confused thing. I'm guessing it either got delayed or cancelled, which would suck. No, I haven't heard the Atlas Sound compilations. I'll search for them. How are you? How's the work going? What work are you doing right now? ** Jheorgge, Big congrats on getting that bookshop job. What's your gig there exactly? Is it a decent shop? Oh, yes, I'm interested in this tasty sounding Judith Prieth thang. I'll suck it up post-exile and p.s. Everyone, here's the great and powerful Jheorgge: 'if yr interested, i sacraficed lady gaga's 'alejandro' in a satanic ritual with john wiese and shit & shine under my 'judith prietht' guise, it's here for lissining pleasurezh...' I dare you to resist that link. I double dare you. ** Flit, Hey, Flitster. Back to UMASS, eh? Good news, although I hope it doesn't take you too far away from here. That site you linked to looks very cool at a first glance. More for me later. Meanwhile ... Everyone, the one and only and truly Flit recommends a site called 'Fuck Yeah Menswear' that I really think you ought to see. ** Sypha, Half-way point, awesome. That's far enough that finishing it starts to get more likely, I think. Cool. Quite an album haul. Personally happy to see No Age among the purchases. I like 'em. ** Misanthrope, Hey. Well, yeah, the constant inundation is the problem. That's why I don't really blame Biebs or whoever so much. The antique teen idols, the Cassidy brothers or Bobby Sherman or whoever, were everywhere you looked too in their day. It's just that back when the places where you looked were magazines and a few cable TV channels and stuff, and it used to be a matter of choice. And fuck knows it's all money driven and empty. It's incredibly worse than it was, but escapism has always been most people's motivation for seeking out music and movies and books and whatever, and the shit has always made more money than the good stuff. I just think the blame goes to the media and then back along the chain to the corporations. I don't know it will ever change, at least in the US. Well, I just meant polls asking who people want as the next President two years before they have to decide is the pointless part. I think those President polls are just graphs of the levels of people's dissatisfaction the week they're taken and not much else. ** Andrew, Hey. Post-apocalyptic, how so? ** Nb, Well, howdy there, pardner. 80 isn't too bad. 85 would be pushing it. When do you get to go home? I figuring, like, Sunday, right? I'm okay. Novel, blah blah, Harry Potter maybe today, Munich at the weekend, etc. Hang in there, you tall glass of water. ** Colin, Hey, Colin. No problem, sir. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, Hey. Oh, back in time like a few years, not like centuries or anything, although ... I'll say no more. Yury did like the art show. He draws and stuff, you know. He's interested in making art and in up-to-the-second technology, so that show was custom made for him. That friend of a friend and her demon is trippy. Kind of scary a little. Just last night a friend was telling me how a mutual friend of ours says he's going to make a ghost. Like a real ghost. Based on instructions in some ancient book. Except apparently making a ghost is expensive to do. So, that's a problem. I like your emotionally complicated graveyard visit. You really should use stuff like that in your fiction. It's so ripe. Well, 'should' is a bad word. I mean, like, it would be cool. My day: Worked on novel. I have maybe 20 pages left to go. The narrator, who's now back in the past, just watched a film on TV starring his biological father Pierre Clementi and had a revelation. I can't tell you more details 'cos it might spoil the novel when you read it. So, most of the day was taken up by novel work. I realized that my brain is so busy with the novel that I don't even know day or time I'm supposed to go to Munich and even really what I'm supposed to do there exactly, so I decided that I'd better figure that out today. I finally went to Hard Rock Cafe with Oscar and Kiddiepunk and a friend of Oscar's. So, I had my beloved nachos, although they weren't quite as good as usual, but they were fine. And iced tea. And lots and lots of music videos: John Mayer, Michael Jackson, Deep Purple, Lita Ford w/ Ozzy Osbourne, ... They were mostly awful, but the dinner was nice. Our waitress was Brenda. She was kind of a nerd working what I think was a hot body. And, like everyone who works at HRC, she was very, very nice like people always think Los Angelenos are. After dinner, I came home, started putting together a blog post but got sleepy and didn't finish, and chatted with Yury, and crashed. That was it. What did Wednesday have in store for you? ** Alan, Hey, man. How are you? What's going on with the move and the novel and everything else? ** Postitbreakup, Yeah, I'm glad your friend had the same idea/advice. It really seems like a natural, you know? Give it a real and dedicated try, I say. Oh, and the posts offer is wonderful of you, and thanks a lot, man. ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, Wait, how can you be in the post and in the p.s. at the same time? That's spooky. Thank you in the most heartfelt possible way for the stuff upstairs today, man. Really, really appreciate it. Oh, that porn was called 'Bad Boys Club'? Cool. I've been trying to remember the title so I can find it. That scene, that boy, yikes. Some of Toby Ross' early films are really good, and he did know how to work Pink Floyd tracks. 'Schoolmates' is my fave. The original version. It's been cut up into two films now. And 'Boys of the Slums' too, among others. Anyway, dude, have such a pleasant day today, please? ** Wow, unless there's a knock on my door before I finish proofing the p.s., I made it through today pre-exile. Weird. Please savor what TDFG have made for you today and then say so. That would be cool. See you tomorrow.
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