Something I wrote about Mount Eerie in 2017 that I'm putting here so someone else can read it

 .........BEFORE.............

It was the rush of sound that first got me. Mount Eerie was a name that meant little to me aside from probably one of those Pitchfork feted acts that are never actually much good, but the press release posted up on the venue website indicated something way beyond Brooklyn/Portland hipster indie. An interesting new musical Venn diagram had been emerging in the late 00s as the dense fog of black metal started to shift away from anything you could conventionally call metal, meeting the lush multilayered palette of shoegaze somewhere in the middle. At the heart of this former no man's land, a thick dark forest lashed by wild winds. What if the wind could talk to us? This is where I found Phil Elverum, a man making records outside and around genre boundaries, his fragile voice and unusually direct words hanging there in the sonic storm.

Wind's Poem did not make my top ten albums of 2009 list. Looking back at that list now, it's a picture of the musical crossroads at which I found myself in my late thirties. "Indie", whatever that means, had started to bore me senseless. Four or five white men in their twenties (this was starting to change, but only just, then) with guitars and bass and drums and songs; it had been my default since my teens and it felt like I'd heard it all, repeatedly. ‎Most of the bright lights of the first half of the decade - those that hadn't already burnt out or disintegrated - were at the difficult third album stage, and yes, a lot of those third albums were pretty difficult to care about. I had been through a lot of personal struggles over the past year and singers singing songs about songy things mostly annoyed me; the sound pictures of various points on the loose "post-rock" spectrum were increasingly where I wanted to be, where I actually felt something. My once beloved British Sea Power had, following one of those mediocre third albums, surprisingly wandered into this territory with an almost entirely instrumental soundtrack album, the point where they were no longer just an indie band (and almost a decade later remain one of my absolute favourite bands, which I don't think would have happened had they stayed in their indie rock lane). Barely half the records I was buying had vocals. But there was something different about Phil Elverum. Every word seemed at once painstakingly chosen yet free flowing, a monologue of blank verse which complemented the melee. I kept going back to it. I'd now place it ahead of most of that list. But it was what he did next that cemented his place in my upper pantheon.

Largely retired from reviewing, in early 2013 I felt compelled to take to the pages of Louder Than War (original link: http://louderthanwar.com/41082/ ) to right the wrong of the two albums which topped my personal list in 2012 remaining absent from most of the published lists...

"They made their way across the sea, six months apart, packaged like gifts from afar. Each box addressed by hand and bound with patterned tape bearing the name of the organisation from which they had originated: P.W.ELVERUM & SUN, LTD. ANACORTES. I looked it up on a map, and things started to make sense. Up there at the western end of the border between Washington State and Canada the coastline dissolves into a scatter of islands and outcrops; the small city of Anacortes is bounded on three sides by water, at the head of a strait that separates the two countries as they reach out into the North Pacific Ocean. It covers the northern third or so of Fidalgo Island where the oceanic crust lifts above sea level; a couple of miles south lies a mountain whose unique geological composition tells stories of uplift and submersion and glacial erosion. Its name is Mount Erie.

This year more than any before I have found fascination in coastlines, the fractal forms and geology and history on the edges of continents; the rift at Thingvellir in Iceland where the North American and Eurasian continental plates meet blew my mind as much as any of the music I heard out there. Sometimes you can hear the landscape in the music; from sea-blasted folk laments to ambient echoes, dreampop atmospheres to the distant rolling thunder of black metal. And there, on the other side of the world, the other side of that continental plate, those same sounds permeate the work of Phil Elverum. Wind, sky, water. The moon pulls those tides; the wind batters the coast; it’s all connected.

In “Clear Moon” the theme centres around home and what that means: the twin titles of “The Place Lives” and its immediate successor “The Place I Live” say so much more than the few words that comprise them, whilst “Ocean Roar” is a walk outside in the dead of night. Elverum described his second album of 2012 as “more challenging and weird and darker and heavier” – which it undoubtedly is – but again, if one considers them the remaining two thirds of a triptych then it’s a reminder that the weather may calm down for a while, but only ever for a while.

Throughout, each layer of sound travels and echoes between the speakers, immersing you in something of the fog which crops up repeatedly in the words. Sometimes it’s like the very music itself is being buffeted around in the weather, Elverum’s voice half-heard against the wind that’s building up again. I wonder if my own affinity with these albums has been influenced not just by those experiences of travels but by the relentless rain that’s lashed our own little island this past year. I’m guessing Anacortes gets its fair share of that, too.

These are not albums to be shoved on repeat, and especially not on shuffle. They are not background. You can use them as backgrounds, sure, and in that context you’ll get a couple of decent ones, although Elverum’s wonderful disdain for the modern fashion of overcompression means you may have some rather quiet spells. Listening, however, is richly rewarded; close your eyes and take a night walk around a small city on the edge of a continent, bounded by water, fog, wind, a mountain, moonlight and the inky blackness beyond."

My copy of his next album "Sauna", released in early 2015, didn't see a lot of turntable time until recently. The noise was quieter, the subject matter smaller.‎ It contains a whole song about seeing a pumpkin while out for a walk. Yet maybe it makes some sense now, in a context we never knew at the time. Elverum was always an extremely private person, his longtime relationship with artist ‎Geneviève Castrée ‎(whose own musical project O PAON supported Mount Eerie at least once when I saw them) none of our business, but we know now that "Sauna" was gestating around the same time as their daughter. The chaotic life of making art when it suited them, wandering around the islands, would presumably have to change. ‎Responsibility, adulthood; the artists recast as parents. Who knows what music he made after that in the parallel universe where life carried on as normal? Did he drift into comfortable indie-folk, or all-out experimentalism? We will never know. The weather may calm down for a while, but only ever for a while. There was another storm on the horizon and not, this time, from the sky. Wit‎h hindsight, Sauna's low key small world meanderings are the cosy warm-glowing early scenes of a devastating film.

........AFTER........

Walking out to some northern quarter venue earlier this year, checking facebook for stage times as I waited to cross a road, a post from my friend Ian caught my eye. New Mount Eerie? Ooh. It's a youtube link but there'll probably be a release date and stuff in the blurbs. There might have been, I can't remember. There were lyrics, though. And thus it was walking down Aytoun Street that I saw those words for the first time; later, at home, heard them.

“In October 2015, I was out in the yard, I just finished splitting up the scrap two-by-fours into kindling, I glanced up at the half moon pink chill refinery cloud light. Two big black birds flew over, their wings whooshing and low. Two ravens, but only two, their black feathers tinted in the sunset. I knew these birds were omens but of what I wasn't sure. ‎They were flying out toward the island where we hoped to move. You were probably inside. You were probably aching, wanting not to die...”

Talk about floored.

Geneviève died in the summer of 2016, a year or so after a mention of some minor pain at a post-natal check-up led to a scan and a diagnosis of a type of cancer that doesn't see a whole lot of people talking about post-chemo hair and disease-free anniversaries. Phil didn't want to make music, but it came anyway, Sparse, broken, his direct style of wordsmithery forcing the listener to acknowledge his wracked grief. ‎And there was going to be... a whole album of this? At which point you stop and say, hang on, do I want to hear this? Should I want to hear this? I wasn't sure. In 2017 we often subconsciously put everything through the "is it problematic?" filter. Isn't this just grief tourism, grief porn even? Just because a man (who may or may not have been entirely of sound mind) made this record doesn't mean it's OK to enjoy it, or does it? But we watched Nick Cave on the big screen channeling his grief into art. And anyway, a young widower with a chaotic artist's income has a child to support, so take my money. When the needle finally hit the record, it was harrowing... heart-wrenching... but what a record.

The space looms as loudly as those sheets of noise once did. Yes, it still sounds exactly like Mount Eerie only with little more than a voice and a guitar. I've personally never really been much of a fan of the "stripped down" version of bands I like; very little in music disappoints quite as much as seeing the name of a band I like (in reference to a new track or a newly announced gig) followed by the word "acoustic". But here, there's quite enough going on. You never miss the noise because it's still so very present, raging through the open windows and out across the water.

I don't think I've ever seen so many words packed into the lyric sheet of a single album. Open the floodgate and the words rush into pools, making pictures more vivid even than those wind/sky/ocean tableaux. You're there, looking through the windows as he clears out her clothes because they're just things, as he glances at the photos on the fridge, as he takes in a parcel and finds it's a backpack for when his daughter starts school and realises Geneviève was planning for a future for which she knew she may not be present. You watch him as he takes a boat out to the island where they'd half planned to go and live, or as he hikes up a deserted trail with his daughter on his back, asleep wrapped in her mother's hat. You see nature through his eyes: the colour of the sky, the foxgloves growing by the path (did she like foxgloves? He can't quite remember, now), the water and the wind and the mountains. The same water and wind and mountains he was writing about a few years aago, but the perspective is different: where just three years ago on "Sauna" he muses about emptiness, here "conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about before I knew my way around these hospitals". Taking the garbage out at night he still feels "with the universe, the thunder and lightning coming in over the mountains" but then he has to go back inside to a house full of the space where someone used to be.

There is, of course, no closure. There are glimmers of light, though, up on that trail as the needle traces the final grooves to the end of side two:

“All the usual birds were gone or freezing
It was all silent except the sound of one crow
Following us as we wove through the cedar grove
I walked and you bobbed and dozed
Sweet kid, we were watched and followed and I thought of Geneviève
Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep
"Crow," you said
"Crow," and I asked
"Are you dreaming about a crow?"
And there she was”

Even copying that here, without the record on, I'm struck by its simple, devastating beauty. As he ended his set in Leeds in November - one of just a handful of live dates, touring as the single parent of a small child is never going to be easy whatever the circumstances - there were a few silent seconds before the (massive) applause: it wasn't really a gig anyone would have been at if they didn't know what they were going to see. I looked around the room and realised every stranger and a couple of friends in there had at some point heard this record for the first time, possibly, like me, uncertain as to whether they wanted to, and then sat there an hour or so later wondering where those goosebumps and tears came from.

How could this be album of the year? It can't be, because that would indicate some level of rating against other records, and that's not really possible. Or indeed some recommendation to drop what you're doing and listen, but that's not going to happen either. For a start, it's an incredible album that was never meant to exist. And it probably isn't for most people. I don't know how it would work if you didn't already have half a foot in Elverum world. Yet for those of us who did, because at some point in our lives this rather ordinary looking bloke from a strange volcanic peninsula was there in our own darker times, how could this not be album of the year?

A few words about Grant McLennan

 

 

A FEW WORDS ABOUT GRANT MCLENNAN

Originally written 7th May 2006 and published on now defunct Myspace blog; republished 6th May 2016 as I still remember it like it was yesterday. I have posted it here in its original form, with a couple of newly added editor's notes in italics.

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm busy cutting and pasting bits and bobs from my past week into some kind of order (at the time I was writing a weekly music blog on Myspace which I generally posted on Sunday evenings) whilst flicking around a few bands' forums whilst thinking I should really have a bath and generally wishing I hadn't had all those jugs of cocktails last night. Another unremarkable Sunday afternoon at Aubergine Towers. I click onto one forum to see if anyone else I was out with last night is feeling as rough as I am and one thread title stops me in my tracks.

Grant McLennan RIP

Did I imagine that? I open it and there's a link.

“On Saturday 6th May, legendary Australian singer songwriter Grant W McLennan died in his sleep at his home in Brisbane…..”

I was a teenager when the sounds of The Go-Betweens first filtered into my life around the time of the album "16 Lovers Lane", which still remains to this day one of my favourite albums ever. As well as having recorded more outstanding songs than most bands could dream of, I was always amazed by the fact that a band could boast two such incredibly talented yet complementary singer-songwriters; it seemed almost greedy of them, and it would be well over a decade before British Sea Power became only the second band to feature twice in my personal all time top ten of such things. (Separate but complementing singer songwriters that is. Obviously as a teenage Stranglers fan I'd grown up with the idea that bands with only one lead singer were missing a trick).  And has there ever been a lyric written as evocative in its simplicity as "Cattle And Cane"? I'd never been outside of Northern Europe, rarely in fact outside of North West England, but you only need to soak up those words to feel the Australian sun on your back.

If you read my ramblings on a regular basis you'll remember my reminiscences about the stormy revival and implosion of the Chameleons - with the Go-Betweens it never really felt like that. They split up, they got back together, they did other stuff, but there was just this kind of feeling that, like New Order in a way, (yes I wrote this in 2006, OK?)  they would always exist, always come home to each other. It seems that more often than not, when a band has been going for decades, that anything they release feels like a pale shadow of their former glories and I honestly could not name a great many bands who have produced some of their best work well into middle age, but last year's "Oceans Apart" absolutely blew me away. I was smiling to myself when I read a few magazines' end-of-year reviews and realised I was not the only person who thought that. At a time when I was gradually and grudgingly having to accept that I'd never see my 20s again, at least half the songs on this stunning album evoked a feeling of lost youth and reminiscence.

It was going to be OK, this middle age thing, because Grant McLennan and Robert Forster were with me all the way.

I laughed out loud watching Series 4 of "24" when the sinister corporation behind whatever atrocity it was that Jack Bauer was having to deal with was named as "Forster McLennan". It might actually have been "Forrester" rendered short of a syllable through Kiefer Sutherland's drawl, but I'd like to think that was for legal reasons and that somewhere in the scriptwriting room was a fellow Go-Betweens fan. (I can't even begin to describe how excited I was when a couple of years later confirmation popped up on the band's Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Betweens - Evan Katz, I salute you).

One post-British-Sea-Power-gig morning in Brighton I was flicking though the local freesheet waiting for my mate I was staying with to wake up, when I noticed the Go-Betweens were playing in the town that night. There were no northern dates and I started thinking about staying down one more night and watching them, but with my job at the time under threat of redundancy I figured either throwing a sicky or booking a same-day holiday might not go down too well on my record, and drove back up the A23 and away from them.

I never realised it would have been the last chance I ever had.

I never met Grant McLennan or Robert Forster. I never wanted to. Much as I still love the music of the Chameleons, the experiences of 2002-03 changed some things. They had been heroes and now they were human beings, they had faults and flaws and the irritating little tendencies real people do and whilst I still count myself as exceedingly privileged to have got to know the people behind some of the music that soundtracked my life, some stars had fallen from my sky. Grant and Robert remained there, and that's where I wanted them.  I do however have a favourite personal memory of Grant - they last time they played in Manchester, in spring 2003 at Academy 3, sound gremlins were rendering his guitar almost unplayable and on reaching a part of the set where Robert took the lead on a couple of songs, he handed the errant instrument to one of the road crew and wandered offstage. At the front of the crowd and in front of me was a fan who was clearly so intensely moved by the set that he had his eyes closed, singing along with his hand on his heart. Grant slipped out of the side door and almost unnoticed into the audience to the point where I was almost frozen to the spot when I found him standing beside me. He leaned over and tapped the lad on the shoulder. "Pretty good aren't they?" The lad turned around, initially looking aggrieved that someone had broken into his own little personal space - and then he saw the grinning face of his hero and smiled back enthusiastically - probably pretty speechless himself. Grant then aimed a couple of incomprehensible heckles at his partner and foil, before the roadie finally beckoned him back to his now fixed guitar. Maybe you had to be there but it was a great moment.

I had been thinking about the band recently after hearing echoes of their sound in a young Manchester band called Amida who randomly contacted me when I first set up (the Myspace music blog), and have been blowing the dust off a few of those old albums as well as "Oceans Apart". My job's more secure these days with the redundancies pretty much having come to an end, and I can't help thinking that one dodgy day off probably wouldn't have mattered that much in the grand scheme of things, but there's no point having regrets. Thank you Grant for a legacy of songs that is almost incomparable. And maybe up there in Australian indie rock heaven David McComb is waiting with a few tinnies and a guitar.

POSTSCRIPT, 6/5/16

Four years later I finally made it to Australia and saw those wide open spaces with my own eyes. As I documented here - http://cathupthedownescalator.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/longest-awayday-australia-music-and-me.html - Grant and Robert were never far from my thoughts, as we travelled by train across thosands of miles of open country or wandered up to Sydney's Darlinghurst district in search of the bars the young singers were hanging out in when they first moved from Brisbane. Brisbane itself did not feature in that trip - there just wasn't time - but we always said we'd go back one day. It's not happened yet, but it will.

ACROPOLIS NOW! - When Awaydays Go Bad... Ten Years On

An Account Of The Weekend The Chameleons Split, 10th April 2003

Compiled 10th April 2006 from things written at the time and other thoughts

Published here 10th April 2013

 

Apologies for the formatting being all over the place, I had to dredge up bits of HTML off my old Myspace blog and it seems the gremlins have got in, but I think it's (mostly) readable....

 

 

 

 

And so, I'll remember you
I'll remember the days and the thousands of ways you pulled me through
And dream of all the things you've seen
And all the faces and all of the places we have been
Now you have no phone and you have no name and you have no number
When it comes to an end in the blink of an eye it makes me wonder
- Tears, The Chameleons

 

Those words. They've seen me through all manner of hard times over a great number of years, but on 10th April 2003 they suddenly took on a whole new meaning. This is the story of how I came as close as I ever have to turning my back on the life I'd come to know and love - and of why you should never take your favourite band for granted.

 

A bunch of people sitting around drinking in in the late afternoon; clearly on holiday - if the fog wasn't so bad you could see the Acropolis in the background. What's wrong with this picture? The answer is that these people have, to coin a phrase, come on holiday by mistake.

IN THE BEGINNING

The Chameleons had been my favourite band since they first crackled through my little mono radio-cassette courtesy of Tony 'The Greek' Michaelides' The Last Radio Show on Piccadilly FM in the mid 80s. Sunday nights were a no-no for any social activity in our family, not that there was a great deal to do in the nowhere I grew up other than hang around the park or the station platform, but I didn't really care. From seven until ten I'd be shut in my room, finger poised over the record button in case anything sounded good, and I'd find out what it was later on. To a generation of Manchester kids Tony was our John Peel, Steve Lamacq and slightly weird uncle rolled into one hed gently push our musical boundaries with world music and that rappy dancey stuff that I was still some years off even recognising as music, but in between there would be all the best of local music from punk to the present. It was here that I first heard the caustic growl of Mark E Smith; here that I first realised New Order had a slightly more interesting history than their disco pop hits would suggest; here that I fell in love with The Distractions' It Doesnt Bother Me which remains one of my all time favourite singles; and here that I first heard a dark, violent but intoxicating record about a whore in my bed, a noise in my head, a hole in my mind, it's coming and there's nowhere to hide. Tony wasn't always that great at back-announcing what he'd played and I never found out what it was. Some months later another record he played caught my attention, and he introduced it as Tears, the new single from The Chameleons; eventually as I became more of a fan and sought out their previous records I found out that the hole in my mind song, In Shreds, was them as well.

I was 15 when they split up; I never saw them live. Manchester was becoming quite an exciting place musically and my head and heart filled up with The Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets and a million bands that never made it to their level of fame. The Man From Del Monte, Sense Of Purpose, The Waltones, The Railway Children, The Bodines, Swing, Mirrors Over Kiev, New Morning, The Fallover 24, The Mysterious Fifth Member, The Train Set, The Samphires, The Desert Wolves, I salute you all. The Mock Turtles forfeited their place in my list of great lost bands by jumping the baggywagon a couple of years later and making some truly shite records, but their goth-tinged 1987 Pomona EP is well worth a listen. Years later I met someone who knew one of Fallover 24, and she mentioned to him my interest in their one single that I had never been able to get a copy of the old cassette having long since been chewed up; and so it came to pass that one day in 2005 in Belfast (where he now lives) I met him in a bar. He was almost as emotional that anyone could remember and want their single after twenty long years as I was that I had finally found a copy. But anyway, Manchester became Madchester; the scene withered and died; I became a student just as the ultimate student-music Shoegazing arrived; grunge and Britpop bored me into the techno clubs; Doves woke me up; Manchester was reborn - a potted history of my musical life 1988-2000. In the background though there was always the Chameleons, never quite surpassed.

It started with a rumour I didn't quite believe, and I was not in the minority when I spent much of the 2000 Manchester Academy Resurrection gig with tears streaming down my face. Some years later I showed the video of that gig to a younger friend who had never really been aware of the band and even to someone who knew little of the history, the emotion in the crowd and the band were evident. Through the bands website and forum I met other fans and gradually we coalesced into a regular crew who would follow the band around the country. And then further afield. I cant remember whose idea it was to go to New York in 2002 but it was, quite simply, the most preposterous idea we'd ever had. Then it was all round Germany in a bitterly icy November. Somewhere I have the tour diaries I wrote of these trips, maybe I'll dig them out sometime too.

Anyway, so back to 10th April 2003. Strangely it seems so very much longer than just three years ago (remember, this bit was originally written in 2006 - these days it does feel like about ten years should). Some parts of it all I remember like it was yesterday, but others might have faded or become corrupted as old files do in minds as in hard drives. But ever the documentarist, I wrote it all down at the time. It was possibly going to become part of a website, a book, or something of stories of my musical life in 2003. They would have been here if I'd had this page then. As it was bits of them ended up on bands' forums, other bits never made it out of my computer until now. Over to my slightly younger self then...

 

 

ACROPOLIS NOW!

CAST OF CHARACTERS
 

Gaz and Ness (the latter may occasionally be referred to by her old "forum name" Debaser) - Old-time Chameleons fans from Lincoln. We had met them when the band played Nottingham Longest Day festival in summer 2001 and got to know them properly at Chameleons drummer John Lever's 40^th birthday party a few weeks later.
 

Jo lived near Rochdale and was probably the most passionate Chameleons fan of all of us; she and her then partner had seen more gigs in the reunion era than anyone.
 

Max and Amanda had joined the Chameleons forum after meeting Jo at the Witchwood gig in 2002, and later that year had decided to go and watch the band in New York. My other half Nick and I joined them along with Gaz (Ness is a teacher and it was term time) and a couple of others; by the end of the four day trip we all felt as if we had known each other for ever.
 

Frazer was probably second only to Nick as Person I Went To Most Gigs With in 2003. Ness and Jo originally acquired him at a Chameleons gig, around 2001 I think, on the grounds that (a) he was always there at Chameleons gigs and some others as well, often on his own (b) He had a highly sought-after Mark Burgess And The Sons Of God T-shirt that we all wanted and (c) Ness thought he looked a bit like Alan Rickman. I think that was him anyway. I can't comment because I can't actually remember what Alan Rickman looks like. Frazer is also partly responsible for introducing me to British Sea Power, for which I owe him a debt of eternal gratitude, and my internal organs and bank balance want to kill him. He was present on three of my Overseas Awaydays in 2003, as well as a large number of those closer to home.
 

When you think of Greece, the first thought that comes into your head is what? Ancient civilisation? The Olympics? Ouzo? Plate-smashing weddings? Island-hopping holidays? Nana Mouskouri?
 

 

Darkly atmospheric north Mancunian guitar music?
 

Puressence are hugely popular in Greece. If there is a sensible reason for this, then I am completely unaware of it. Their regular mini-tours are greeted with adulation. They are the only British band I have ever come across whose website offers information in Greek (it did at the time I wrote this, anyway). So when rumours started back in spring 2002 of a Chameleons gig in Athens there was no question that we'd be going, along with Gaz and Ness and Jo and Ian. Lets go and check out the scene in this most unlikely outpost of music taste then the date came and went; they'd obviously not quite got it together, and we forgot about it.

 

I'm not quite sure on which part of the grapevine we heard it was back on. Some time in March (our good friend and Mancunian gig going legend) Alex (Staszko) had run into Martin, one of the band's regular sound engineers who used to be in a local Hacienda era band called Intastella, who'd mentioned it in passing. Dave Fielding had pretty much moved to Lincoln at this point and Gaz and Ness had seen him in the pub and he'd mentioned it. Mark had told me he was trying to sort it out. Text messages and e-mails spread out across the network. A few months earlier, drinking in the evening sun outside a venue in Philadelphia, Dave had picked up my Awayday itinerary off the table and laughed "You're more organised than we are..." 
 

In a strange way it was true. The Chameleons were four (or five, if you count Kwasi) men in their 40s with their own lives; Mark in Hamburg, Dave now in Lincoln, Reg settled down with a young child; John and his (then) fiancee trying to buy a house. There's no doubt Simon their manager was capable; his other charges Shed 7 still seemed to be able to sell out venues decidedly out of proportion to their meagre talents - but to be honest taking on the Chameleons is not a job I'd have wanted. It's no criticism at all of Simons abilities if he sometimes seemed a little out of his depth.
 

Anyway a few days later Mark formally announced the show on the band's bulletin board, as well as a low-key set in the delightfully named Tribal Booze Club the night before. By this point the usual suspects of us, Ian and Jo, Gaz and Ness, Max and Amanda, and Frazer had all signed up, although Ian had to withdraw when he realised he had some Dutch visitors he'd met through watching his other fave band The Church coming over to visit. It wouldn't be the same without him. I was starting to have a bad feeling about this whole thing, and that was before I looked at a map and noticed how physically close Greece was to Iraq! (You have to put your head back into early 2003 for that to make sense).  Meanwhile rumours filtered in from various sources that some members of the band were far from happy with the plans, or indeed with Mark's booking of three solo gigs in the UK in May, the primary purpose of which seemed to be to cover his costs coming over for City's last ever match at Maine Road which happened to coincide with his birthday. It would all be all right on the night anyway. Always was.
 

Frazer was the advance party and by Thursday morning had already discovered that the hotel we'd excitedly booked for about 20 quid a night was that cheap for a reason. Alarm bells should really have rung when I realised we were in the same one, as Frazer has a natural talent for finding the most dubious hotel in any given town. The fact that none of our Puressence-watching mates had heard of the venue was also a little worrying given their regular trips out there so I spent Thursday lunchtime doing a bit of my own research.
 

"Gazi means gas and the district of Athens, once down-at-heel but now rather trendy, takes its name from the city gasworks. The industrial installations of a former gas factory have been transformed by the Municipality of Athens into one of the city's major cultural venues. The construction of this complex started in 1862 in order to provide street lights to the city and to supply households and factories with energy. The gradual replacement of gas by electricity finally led to the closure of Gazi, as the Athenians call the factory, and its transformation into an arts and concert venue.

I buzzed back over to the Chameleons bulletin board to share this information with the team, and within ten seconds the potential safety of a 141-year-old Greek gasworks in a dodgy part of town as a live music venue was the least of my worries
 

A message from Mark entitled "I read the news today, oh boy" had already received a large number of hits. Then I noticed my phone, silenced for some meeting earlier in the day, had received six text messages. I clicked the thread open...
 

Hi everyone..

This is an extremely difficult message to write, in fact in all the 20 years I've been with this band (on and off), I've never had to relate anything that is as shit as this is. And that's the only word for it.. SHIT!!

Last night at around 10:00 p.m. I received a phone call from Reg telling me that Dave and John were NOT going to board the plane for Athens and so obviously were not intending to play the show.. This despite the fact that the promoters Dark Side Records were already heavily invested, having hired a venue, back line, hotels and booked the flights and that tickets had been sold and that quite a few people had already committed to flying to Athens from various points of the compass to see it.

There really isn't any point getting into why they have elected to do this. I've been unable to contact either of them directly. All I have is second hand info via Reg and so it wouldn't be fair to go into it without having actually spoken with them, suffice to say that from what I can gather Dave has taken exception to things that I said in (another message on the bulletin board) and has decided to withdraw from the gig as some kind of protest. I also have to tell you that Reg did everything he possibly could to turn this situation around but it came to nothing. Obviously he feels he cannot possibly appear without them and so, once again, the main responsibility falls upon myself.

Dark Side Records have requested that I travel to Athens and put some kind of gig together and I have agreed to do that. Their only chance of clawing back any of their investment is to stage a show. Obviously, it won't be a Chameleons show and people will be made aware of that in advance. Kwasi Asante has agreed to travel also and play percussion. Our drum tech Chiz also wants to go out there with me and he plays percussion too and even the guitar tech Pete has pitched in and said he'd play bass on a couple of tunes, God bless them. So something will happen, exactly what though I can't say.

So there you have it. Another great day in the life of Chameleon Mark. Oh well, at least now I have an ending for the book....

love and light (everything else is shite)

mark

 

I spoke to Ness, Amanda and Jo immediately and we decided that whilst it might be a wasted journey, we'd paid for flights and hotels so we might as well go anyway. I tried to ring the hotel to get a message to Frazer but it appeared the pleasant English speaking staff advertised on the web site were, erm, not at work that day... "I was meant to be packing and stuff but I haven't done a thing!" said Amanda. I felt much the same. By the evening we had all posted messages of encouragement to Mark along with troops-rousing type statements about still going to have a brilliant time, but I don't think any of us truly believed it
 

Gaz tried to contact Dave but he wasn't answering. I exchanged a few messages with Mark. A few of us had become quite friendly with the band as a result of the somewhat excessive lengths we would go to in order to watch them, and now things were going wrong we were getting caught up in the crossfire. Friday morning Nick and I sat in the departure lounge at Terminal 3, where just six months ago we'd waited excitedly to join the band on their triumphant North American adventure, only this time there was little to be excited about.
 

What exactly are we doing here?
 

Friday evening and the fume-spitting clunker of a bus is bouncing through what looks like Beirut only lined with several thousand shops selling electric light fittings - eventually we find our hotel and I can tell you, it bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the picture on the internet. The friendly and helpful staff have been mysteriously replaced by a mumbling chap who clearly sees our business as something of an inconvenience. Our room is painted snot green, and Frazer's has a dubiously large mirror suspended over the bed, the showers are cupboards (Frazer has already flooded his room by the time we get there) and god help us if there's a fire. We've come half way across the continent for a gig that may not even happen but soon we're sitting outside a kebab shop drinking beer, looking up at the Acropolis and fending off men trying to sell us bongos and dodgy CDs from holdalls. We have, to coin a phrase, come on holiday by mistake and we're going to have a bloody good time! I text Jo and Max and Amanda to meet us at a tube station that begins with M because the rest of the letters in it are only familiar to me from quantum mechanics - maybe its not actually a tube station but the equation for whatever reality we've landed in...
 

Frazer has of course carried out the Advance Party reconnaissance extremely well and we arrive at the address of the evening's entertainment, the Tribal Booze Club. Max and Amanda and Jo go off for food but we are very much in need of some tribal booze. There is however no indication whatsoever that there is any sort of bar, club or indeed life at the address; just a heavy wooden door with peeling paintwork. It's not locked though so we give it a push and behind it a series of chains and pulleys rattles in a manner reminiscent of Hammer horror films. Ahead of us is a narrow staircase, lit only by a red neon sign. The sign says Booze. That'll do.
 

Were greeted at the top of the stairs by a man in a waistcoat saying "shhhhhhhh". The room is completely dark and there is the sound of a mournful piano coming from somewhere. A few clumps of silent goths are visible silhouetted against the window. Must be the place then. We whisper an order for drinks and watch the walls change colour courtesy of a projection that reminds us of Spacemen 3 gigs. Frazer and Nick decide to investigate the piano sounds, but my weirdness meter is already well into the danger zone, so I settle into a corner. What is this place?
 

Seconds later they reappear - upstairs a woman is dancing a death scene dressed in white rags. We're told to shhhh again, and decide we'd better go greet Max and co at the door, for fear of the performance artist's poignant tale being disrupted with a loud "Awreet cock!" Red light bulbs swing in the background. A woman with white angel wings appears before us. Frazer and I turn to tell Nick but when we turn back she has disappeared. Suddenly anything approaching normality feels a very long way away.
 

Soon the party is swinging - well, if you can call it that. Goth type music so obscure even Jo doesn't know it. "There's some very foolhardy attempts at dancing going on near the bar", surmises Nick. I get a text from Mark's wife Danni saying they will be there in a minute which appears to have been sent an hour ago, then one from Ness which appears to have been sent two hours ago, and am excitedly searching for the rip in the fabric of space-time if there is one anywhere it could surely be here - when I realise, somewhat disappointedly, that their phones still think they're in Germany and England respectively. Mind you that doesn't explain the disappearing angel woman...
 

Our Englishness stands out a mile and we are surrounded by Greek fans who want to know whats going on with tomorrow's gig. We just tell them we don't know anything really, but when a grown man with tears in his eyes tells you "The Chameleons are the biggest band in my life, I have been waiting to see them for 20 years, why do they not come?" it's a devastating moment. I promise to introduce him to Mark later but I never see him again.
 

Mark and Danni and (drum tech) Chiz and Kwasi arrive soon, through the door rather than any temporal anomaly, and the place fills up with serious looking people dressed in black. I fear my beloved green and yellow Brazil top was maybe not the most appropriate choice of clothing. Amanda comments that Greeks make great goths cos they don't have to dye their hair, although the Mediterranean sunshine must mess with the regulation pale complexion.
 

Mark straps on an acoustic and plays a few songs, but he's not looking happy. A new ad-lib in the middle of Soul in Isolation has some interesting advice for Blair, Bush, Straw et al and for a second we remember there's a real war on not too far away... Mark's voice is in great form, although Max, unamplified, is possibly louder. After that the music gets (slightly) more varied and before we know it we are pogoing to the Buzzcocks. A girl walks past with a beer in her hand and a pair of angel wings under her arm. Frazer and I breathe a sigh of relief...
 

Saturday arrives and so do Gaz and Ness - as I'm making a butty out of the stale bread roll and possibly antique boiled egg that constitutes the hotel's distinctly utilitarian breakfast choice, and we decide the bar over the road might be a better bet. Nick, Jo and I had been a little apprehensive about the availability of edible vegetarian food in Greece, however as we tucked into delicious bowlfuls of feta, tomatoes, olives and chips it was the carnivores who were having trouble. "Gyros is a kebab, isnt it", mused Frazer and ordered a large one. Max and Ness both opted for the beefsteak. Frazer's gyros turned out to be the largest pile of shredded animal imaginable, and rather lacking in most of the ingredients one would expect in a kebab, such as bread, salad or seasonings of any kind, but he made a valiant stab at it. "Beefsteak!" called the waiter, and Max's eyes lit up. Then darkened just as quickly when his plate was delivered containing not a juicy lump of grilled steak, but three rather pathetically sized meatballs, which he proceeded to pick at whilst looking rather miserable. "We ordered two beefsteaks" said Ness, surmising that however disgusting said dish looked it wouldn't do to confuse them by ordering something else. The waiter muttered to himself and hurried inside. He returned with the waiter who had originally taken our order, and some exchange of raised voices followed, before they both disappeared inside.
 

Some time later, with most of us full (Max consoling himself with a generous helping of Frazer's unidentified meat strips) the waiter returned. "Your steak..." - I don't know which was funnier, the look of delight on Ness's face as she surveyed the huge cut of still sizzling steak in front of her, or the look of complete devastation on Max's. "Served you right for grabbing the first one" said Amanda, and deep down he knew she was right!
 

So the sun is out and we're in bloody Athens for some reason - lets go see the Acropolis! I'm ashamed to say we made it as far as a bar. We could see the Acropolis though, currently covered in tasteful scaffolding while they try and clean it up for the 2004 Olympics. This is why most of Athens is currently a building site. Frazer, for the first of what turns out to be many times this year, pulls out an improbably large map.
 

 

Gazi is, erm, not on it. Nor is it in my guide book. Oh well, we know vaguely which direction it's in... Drinking in the afternoon sun with friends, surrounded by thousands of years of history - what a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Maybe it would all be OK. For all we knew the lads could be on the plane out right now, having woken up and realised that most people do not get offered all expenses paid weekend breaks in Greece. Or Mark could pull this one off on his own and sort it out when he got back. Whoever heard of a band chucking in all that history because of a couple of misplaced or misinterpreted comments on their bulletin board?
 

We head down into Gazi as evening falls. The roads are rough and the buildings remind me more of Cuba than anywhere European. Men - only men - sit drinking coffee in dilapidated shop windows. We're possibly the only tourists they have ever seen. Oh hang on, not quite the only ones. Here's Kwasi, strolling down the road with half a dozen laughing local children hanging on to his dreads! We head for the corner coffee shop with him and Chiz where the Turkish hosts drive off in a rusted old car and return with a boot full of beer for us, which we cheerfully demolish on the front yard.
 

 

As the sun goes down and Ness for some reason tries to teach the young lad of the family how to play a tune on a leaf, Nick wanders inside the shop to get the bill. When he fails to reappear we look in and find he has been coerced into some Turkish dancing! Kwasi is next in there. Soon we're all joining in, and the mood is upbeat, Kwasi assures us the gig will be fantastic and that things are never quite as bad as they seem... Thats Kwasi though, in public at least, always looking for the bright side of things like the stereotype Rastas in the Lilt adverts. Then there are raised voices from inside the shop. I've got my back to the window but those who can see inside shudder a little.
 

 

"Did you fuckin see that?" spits Chiz. A sinewy, shaven-headed Aberdonian who certainly looks like he could kill with his bare hands, Chiz has just seen the man of the house beat the woman. Built-like-a-brick-shithouse Gaz and black-belt-in-something-or-other Amanda are ready to steam in and batter him, but Kwasi talks them out of it. We realise we are in a place where the cultural paradigms are rather different from ours, and we've all read Greek Jail horror stories. What could we do? Step in and then what? If we did, chances are she'd take a worse beating when we left. Feeling unsettled but ultimately helpless, we decide this would maybe be a good time to go to the club.
 

The X-Bug Club is packed. The support band are very good at what they do but its not my thing really, the phrase "Pornography-era Cure" is bandied about and the unchangingly slow tempo threatens to bring our mood down a bit. Not as much as the bar prices though... Jo and I make our way to near the front, but we leave the first few rows to the local fans - another unwritten rule of The Awayday being, of course, that one should always consider people who have not seen the band five million times, and not hog the entire front row. Mark comes onstage and explains the situation politely and diplomatically. I would not have liked to have been in that position myself. There are a few year-long seconds of muttering as those with fluent English translate for their friends it becomes obvious that a large number of them had no idea at all that they were not getting the full band. Money back was offered, and many left immediately.
 

 

Onstage, just Mark and his acoustic 12-string. He played The Healer, a devastatingly sad song at the best of times, and it was beautiful. It.s not quite what some of the crowd expected though, from what I saw of the Athens alternative scene (the incredibly appropriately named Dark Side Records for instance) they like their rock quite loud and hard here. All our hearts went out to Tolis the promoter who had put so much into making this work.
 

No, it wasnt the Chameleons. But it was pretty good. (Looking back, it probably wasn't, but this is what I wrote at the time - it was different, a one-off, and little did we realise that a decade on Mark playing Chameleons songs with whoever he could rustle up would be the band's main legacy on the live scene...)  A few Chameleons tunes, rare outings for songs from Mark's various other musical ventures, a new song with Mark backed by stuff he'd laid down on his laptop .... "Its not quite finished yet", he warned, "some of the lyrics are still kind of yoghurt." Indeed. Pete the long-lost-Gallagher-brother-looking guitar tech was welcomed onstage to play bass and everyone's favourite crew member Chiz took to the drumkit which for reasons best known to the Athenians was positioned about half a mile above the stage. The classic hit-that-never-was Tears and another new one, a seriously funky groove that was great fun to dance to, I was grinning almost as widely as Kwasi. The only down moment was when I realised all the British away team were now right at the front - not something I'd normally complain about...
 

Before long two of the support band had joined in, and we could only imagine how they felt first supporting their favourite band and now actually backing Mark... The encore was The Fall's "Frightened" and a perennially raucous Second Skin.
 

 

Sunday, Nick and Gaz and Ness and Frazer and I decided to check out how the other half live and went down to the seaside resort where Max, Amanda and Jo were staying. It had been a nice break, although the famed Athenian pollution was starting to hurt my head and our ridiculous hotel dealt us one final blow in demanding cash rather than credit card (great, a late night hunt for a cashpoint in a dodgy part of a foreign town is always my choice for the end of an evening, you know?) Max, Amanda and Jo, returning the following day, had it even worse: just outside Luton airport, from where they had flown on a budget airline in order to save money, Max's car breathed its last.
 

Within days of us arriving home the bulletin board war between Mark and Dave had escalated into such a pitched battle that people who had never even heard of the Chameleons were logging on left right and centre to watch the dawning of a new era, the first band ever (probably) to split up entirely on the internet.
 

Such is the power of the new communication: without that board I sincerely doubt we'd have all met, become friends, travelled to quite so many gigs: 35 for me in two and a half years, many more for Ian and Jo. My life would be completely different, I'd never be writing this, nor count among my friends a gay Dutch social worker in Oslo or a Lincoln window cleaner. I'm not even sure the reunion would have lasted as long as it did without the board; the travelling fans packing out lesser publicised gigs from Blackburn to Bielefeld or getting static crowds moving from Macclesfield to Maryland, but it seemed such an undignified ending for a band who in their day were unsurpassable, revered and loved.
 

 

It would be thousands of miles and 158 days later, in a warehouse on the outskirts of Hamburg with Mark and Danni standing behind me, that I fell in love with music again. That's a different story, though....