Let's Make A Racket - IV

Dedicated to the memory of Ethel Rump.

It's Thursday, so it must be time for Dive to make another racket.
This time I shall be even more wilfully obscure and "out-takey" than last week's foray into the swamps and will post only half a song.

We retain last week's cheese fixation as today's racket is taken from the first rehearsal for what became yet another of my "sanity bands", The Cheese Mechanics.

A "sanity band" is what musicians call those occasional bands of old friends you play in simply for pleasure between touring, recording and pro-band stuff (work).

The Cheese Mechanics were:
Neil Daniels: Lead vocals, tenor sax, harmonica and bird-pulling;
Ron "I played the Hamburg bars at the same time as The Beatles and took so many drugs I can't find my arse with both hands" Brace: Drums;
Steve: Bass (and vocals on this track);
and inevitably Michael and myself on keyboards and guitar.

I think this must have been at least twenty to twenty-five years ago. I'm crap at dates and I'm too old to bother any more.
Anyhoo, we got together in West Somerton Village Hall, out on the coast, with a hamper of food and a couple of coolboxes full of beer and jammed a few dozen songs to get a feel for what direction we would take, recording them on to 4-track reel-to-reel so we could listen back later and weed out the crap.

West Somerton Village Hall has a little plaque over the stage that reads "Dedicated to the memory of Ethel Rump", which we promptly adopted as our band motto.
Neil would often announce on stage that a particular song was dedicated to the memory of Ethel Rump (usually one with lots of sexual innuendo in the lyrics); she became our patron saint.

This particular racket is Steve singing (rather badly, he'll be the first to admit) the first half of "Love That Burns". We always knew this song as "Love That Bums" as that's what it looks like scrawled on a set list and taped to the back of a PA stack under stage lights.
After the guitar solo, we stumbled to a halt, nodded to one another and said "Okay! That'll do for that one. What's next on the list?", which was about the extent of our rehearsals for that band.
But I rather liked some of the guitar bits (all improvised) so I kept the recording and will now inflict it on you and dedicate it - of course - to the memory of Ethel Rump.




For the nerds, this was played on Old Les, through a ratty ProAmps VSQ65 with a couple of valves on the fritz.
I also like the fact you can hear the amp click and buzz in the quiet bit before the solo.
Steve Albini uses the same noise to glorious effect in Nina Nastasia's "Nobody Knew Her". Most sound engineers spend ages removing those sounds from tapes but I love to hear them; it makes me grin. After all, that's the sound an amp actually makes when you change channels and light up a few more bottles, so why be ashamed of it?

Here's a photo from around that time with the same equipment (more about this particular gig - the "BBC fucks it up" gig - another day).
That's Ron on drums (having managed to find his arse and plonk it down on his drumstool) and Neil in the polka-dot shirt.
Playing on stage is a dirty, sweaty business and what started the evening as my nice, new green silk shirt ended up so trashed I threw it out the window on the way home.

More crap next week.
You have been warned.