HAPPY 40^TH MARTIN!

This mornings first clip is The Times doing Picture Gallery in Italy 1985. I've posted this because I want to demonstrate my version of the "Windmill", made patently famous by Bruce Forsythe in the '60s as compere of 'Sunday Night At The London Palladium'. And also Pete Townsend of The Who.

The second clip is from the Summer of 1994 during my commission in the Boo Radleys as 'Mr Keyboards', a period that lasted 18 months. One endless happy round of Per Diems, Soundchecks and Brandy Alexanders (or in the USA Scotty's lethal Margaritas).

I absolutely adored these Four Lads From Liverpool Who Shook The World with their Number One Album 'Wake Up'. One of only two bands on Creation Records to do that, the other obviously Oasis.

The real "Number One" album of course was 'Giant Steps', a collection of songs with substantial musical width and depth to their narratives. I genuinely thought that Martin Carr was the most articulate writer on the label who came close in his songs to describing those vague bits in relationships of the heart that leave you feeling that you never really know the person you're with.

Anyway, from the very start, I thought it would be like really wicked if they could get me one of those keyboards you play like a guitar so that I could add a bit of BALLast to the B.R. frontline. Billy Preston I argued, the Fifth Beatle no less, had one.

Plus, it would allow me total mobility to sidle up to Martin during his guitar solos and elbow him in the ribs, grinning my generous toothy grin all the while. Sadly, they never got me one of these prized items so I broke all the black notes on the standard issue keyboard.

This wasn't totally due to spite I hasten to add, more as a direct result of my stock-in-trade "Mill Hill Windmill" as it now came to be known, particularly in the criminal vernacular eg. "E's lookin' for a right good Mill Hill Windmill". Right and left arms would be a "Franny Lee". Oasis would specialise in that manoeuvre. 

Even during my 20 minute acoustic support slot before every Boo show, I'd still find some bit of the set to wind up the ol' right arm and Billy Whizz for England, aprop pos of nothing in the song o).

Since that time, if you've ever come up to me asking "Hey Ed, Did you play on 'Wake Up Boo'?" my reply would invariably depend on whether you were a girl between 21 and 30 ("Yes, I did!") or a fat, balding indie expert git, who probably knew the answer anyway 'cos you had the album ("Er, no."). If this was the case and I said Yes, I do truly apologise. I just thought it would save time. Sorry.

Anywhooo, here's 'Lazarus' at Glastonbury, some moments of which are quite fantastic. Watch it to the end though, for Sice's How To Trash A Guitar Properly, and Martin and mines textbook How To Exit A Stage.

picture gallery THE TIMES Italy 1985

Two interviews, two views of él records  - the first featuring label artist Simon Turner on location in Richmond Surrey, filmed and edited to tell the story from the mercurial musician's POV in 6 minutes. Mike Alway (él's founder and master architect), is just off-camera audience left, firing the questions at Simon. My only contribution to the drama being "Did you ever want to punch Mike Alway?" It's usually a good one to ask in any interview situation . . .

And in the second film, Mike Alway interviewed by Cherry Red founder Iain McNay for Cherry Red TV. Unedited and full of those pregnant pauses that tell you so much - the gaps in between what's being said telling you everything you really need to know about these gentlemen.

As Mike's history unfurls chronologically in the Cherry Red film, we learn that after managing the Soft Boys in the late '70s, He took to divining talent for Cherry Red, saving the Monochrome Set from their unhappy position at Rough Trade, the Marine Girls from an uncertain future at Whaam! and Felt from the Midlands.

This first period neatly comes to a conclusion with one masterly stroke, the 'Pillows and Prayers' 99p collection (on a par with Rough Trades' wickedly titled 'Wanna Buy A Bridge?' U.S. compilation from around the same time) .

And despite the fact that this interview informs us of Mike's long working friendship with Iain and touches briefly on the nagging tooth-ache-short-lived partnership with Geoff Travis, its greatest asset is the capturing of the Mike Alway demeanour. What the Head Boys from 'If . . . .' would call Degeneracy.

He looks and acts like the cool art teacher you never had, who also happens to be a world famous pop philosopher and a multi millionaire into the bargain. This was Mike Alway at anytime, from 1980 to the present day. And in any given space or context, his personality would be enormously magnetic.

Only Mike could pull off a label that purported to be Don Kirshner meets the Renaissance painters - convincing normal intelligent musicians that they should perhaps project "cartoons" of themselves.

But this is the source of real POP, understanding the true character and temperament of your artists, what makes them special to you, how they fit in with your concept and then sharing this gift with the rest of the world. Some have it some don't - Tony Wilson and Alan McGee do, Geoff Travis and Laurence Bell don't. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, its just the way it is.

As a recording artist, it's invaluable because ultimately you'd follow these guys to the gallows and believe in your casting to your dying breath. And most important of all is the way Mike speaks of his four main writers Vic Godard, Karl Blake, Nick Currie and Bid as embodying the four corners of the English speaking world.

In 1984, during one of my visits to the el premises at Henniker Mews up the road from me off Fulham Road, I found Mike sitting behind a beautiful Empire antique period desk, flanked by two smaller desks inhabited by chaps who looked vaguely alike, even more like their boss, both wearing horn-rimmed glasses. This vision was at once Kiplingesque and the stuff of science fiction.

It had only been a short while since The Alway -Travis Major Partnership of Blanco y Negro Records had been the big news in the avenues and alleyways of my knitting circle, but Mike informed me that he was cutting loose from the Warners set-up and "exciting" times lay ahead. He'd been a big fan of my Times 'Pop Goes Art!' from two years earlier and mildly inferred that a writer of that calibre would be much appreciated at él. Fate, as it were, had different plans . . .

Leaping ahead to 1999 as Creation Records was drawing to a logical conclusion, Alan McGee invited Mike to design the sleeves of my final albums trilogy, as a dry run for Poptones. I was thrilled and still think they are the most beautiful Creation sleeves from that period.

Since those times I have been lucky enough to have had many long telephonic conversations with the man and wished I could've taped them all - every single one of them. On days when the 21^st Century seemed like a sarcophagus to me his idealism, imagination, humour, voice, outlook and inspiration were a light to somewhere just over the hills.

A few years back, when I set up the Artpop! Film Unit in the spirit of the Free Cinema guidelines set by Lindsay Anderson in the early 1950s, Mike wholeheartedly supported my vision and wanted to share his él Dream with me as a documentary, in the style of Orson Welles's F For Fake and the marvellous 1966 World Cup film Goal!

We made this short as an inducement. Sadly, the project was never blessed with the requested £1400 budget from those we approached and still lives as an unmade masterpiece in both our heads, I'm sure. 

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