An overcooked marrow, a search for brake fluid & a last-minute arrival on stage
801 from L to R: Bill MacCormick, Brian Eno, Lloyd Watson, Francis Monkman, Simon Phillips and Phil Manzanera.
While still very much linked to my brother and his music, the following is a slight aside from recent thoughts on Urdance. It is prompted by my finding an entry in my dad’s diary that encouraged me to reflect further on last week’s themes of creativity, spontaneity, and risk.
The diary entry is for Saturday, 28th August 1976, and begins simply enough:
Sun & clouds & a stiffish breeze, cooler. After a leisurely bkfst, we all drove in the Sherpa to Duncombe Park & walked on the terrace. I took photos.
As the parched grass in the photo below testifies, the summer of ‘76 was one of the driest, sunniest and warmest in the British Isles in the 20th century, so the ‘cooler’ reference in his diary entry is relative.
At the time, my parents, my brother James, and I lived together in Coxwold, a village nestled beneath the south-western corner of the North Yorkshire Moors, some 240 miles north of London. Francis and his wife, Gingko, and a school friend of James's had joined us for the weekend. The Sherpa in question was a laughably unreliable British Leyland camper van my mum used to ferry James to and fro from school in Winchester. All seven of us must have bundled ourselves into it for the short drive to Duncombe Park.
Here are some of the photographs from that morning:
The diary continues:
After an early lunch ( a stuffed marrow which J [my mum] had forgotten to take out of the top oven before we went to D.Park - but the damage was not so severe, plus rice, white, for speed's sake). F & G [Francis and Gingko] left for Reading where F was due at the pop festival at 7-30;
The 1976 Reading Festival featured 801, a short-lived experimental band formed in 1976 by Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno, in which Francis played keyboards. Together with Simon Philips and Lloyd Watson, they performed three critically acclaimed concerts: the first, a warm-up gig in Cromer, Norfolk, this one at the Reading Festival and a final concert on 3 September at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. This last concert was recorded live and released as the album 801 Live.
I don’t know what time our ‘early lunch’ ended, but I do know that it's a good four-and-a-half-hour drive south from Coxwold to Reading. Of course, that’s not accounting for a break or a hitch:
after a short while they were back, their Triumph's brakes having failed. I tried by phone to raise a garage but no luck. However F got some brake fluid from Mrs Stevens at the garage & this seemed to improve if not mend matters; and off they set again, G in some trepidation, & F worried at being late.
Gingko was always a strong and stoical woman, but her trepidation here is understandable. Throughout his life, Francis drove like a man approaching a chequered flag. In a tearing hurry and with only ‘improved’ brakes to rely on, it must have been a truly hair-raising journey. Of course, in those days, we could know nothing of their progress until, much later that evening, Gingko called;
All must have gone well, for at 10.50, just after I'd fallen asleep, G rang to say that they had arrived at Reading one minute before 7-30
Neither Francis nor Gingko was much given to hyperbole, so I suspect that arrival time’s not much of an exaggeration. Judging by this blurry little shot of the night I discovered (via Google), it certainly wasn’t long enough for him to change his clothes.
All of this creates a mental picture of Francis driving up to the rear of the stage, leaping out of his car and bounding straight up the steps onto the stage and to his keyboards. While I suspect his entry wasn’t quite that dramatic, I find something affirmative in this image. I’m not for a moment correlating dangerous driving with creative expression, but having watched too many heavily produced and choreographed shows recently that lack the freedom and authenticity that’s audibly evident in the recording of 801 Live, I got to wondering whether the experimental, the ad-hoc and the risky have been too much abandoned by a culture that priveledges the frictionless, reproducible, inoffensive ‘show’ that now all too often passes for live rock music.
In my own work, I've often explored the dynamic between audience and performer. When a performance loses its element of risk and becomes too polished and predictable, it diminishes the audience's role. Rather than co-creating a unique and beautiful experience, with both the crowd and performers actively feeding off each other's energy, the audience is relegated to the role of passive consumers.
It’s a theme I’ll develop next week in a different context. In the meantime, this is how my dad signed off his diary entry with his response to Gingko having let him know that all was well:
Nice of her to let us know - We had worried slightly.
Good to hear, Dad.
