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Category: Photography

Social History in Album Cover Art

Posted on by John Reed

As we approach the release of the “Elevation” album, I thought I’d reflect on an unintended but nevertheless inspired artistic twist that happened long before the first songs were recorded, and actually before half of them had been written. I wanted something original for the album art, but also something that told a story. I just wasn’t really sure what that story was.

    

I’d been observing the extraordinary photography of Alec Bowman-Clarke unfold on Instagram and elsewhere for some time, and felt he could offer me something more than just another set of mugshots. I didn’t want to be a musician looking uncomfortably up into space, laughing inanely in a field, a guitarist on top of a mountain or sat by a waterfall, walking along a shore with instrument slung across my back, and in fact didn’t want instruments to appear at all.

I draw my influence from the place where I live, the things around me, and the twisted politics and injustices of the day, and moving here to Berwick has provided a wealth of material. What you see is all part of me. I could also have selected one of the many beaches in the area, historic battlements, dramatic coves, or the windswept lighthouse at the end of the long pier, but I wanted a more personal feel for the album cover, and felt Alec would deliver. He absolutely did.

   

I contacted him soon after we moved here in January last year. At the time, the garden was populated with outbuildings we didn’t need, two of them blocking light and taking up massive amounts of space (we’ve gained between 40-50 square metres in land area, and a similar area that is now free from the shade of these monstrosities). The larger one covered an aesthetically pleasing stone summerhouse with a sea view in one direction and a view of the Chiltern Hills in the other, yet both had their own peculiar character. I’d already taken my own shots of each (can you tell which are mine? 🤣), and sent them to Alec to stimulate first ideas. There was no brief, and in April 2022 he and Josienne spent the day here.

       

I love that little of the backdrop to these photos exists anymore. Both ‘sheds’ have now been demolished and largely recycled, so Alec’s work also provides a historical record. The previous owner died in 2019, with the house then being let out to tenants. The shed in front of the summerhouse had not been completed, although we don’t know why. The green wooden shed had been used as an engineering workshop. There was a metal working lathe in there when we viewed the house, and clearly some form of production had been going on. Apparently, he was also done by HMRC for non payment of a huge amount of tax….so we are told. There was an infestation of ivy on the sheds and throughout the garden, and plenty of lovely wood rot. There was even a large oil barrel on the top lawn half full of half burned, half-decomposed dog shit! “Shall we overturn it to see what’s in there?” are words that still haunt.

   

There is a true quirkiness to this place, from the house name “St. Ursulas”, to the extension and outbuildings constructed by the previous owner, and the eight-step garden on its steep slope. It’s utterly bonkers. The legend of St. Ursula is even moreso, much of it probably untrue or manipulated over the centuries, but it seems her ‘feast day’ is 21st October, which happens to be the day after the “Elevation” album launch this year. ‘Coincidence’ and mystery are what this place is all about, what Berwick is all about, what music is all about, and a kind of resurrection tinged with optimism and no small degree of eccentricity.

   

Alec’s photography seems to have captured all of that: its beauty and decay, its position on the edge of sanity, and the history of this place. Where the rest of us would take a nice snap of a person stood in front of a building or sat inside, he has also managed to capture my own quirkiness, my personal brink of sanity, and has crafted a connection between who I am and the unique backdrop for this album shoot, and of course, the music I am about to unleash on the world.

Judge for yourselves. Look at his website. The man has a very special talent.

Peace.

John

The Adventure Continues

Posted on by John Reed

35 years living in the same house in south Manchester is something I never imagined when we moved in here on 5th December 1986. Before then we’d lived Bristol and Bath, then in Reading for a couple of years, travelling north every six weeks or so to see family with our very small daughter to whom travelling long distance in a car was a clear form of torture. Both Northerners, we are now moving even farther north, away from the mainly Fylde-based wider clan but closer to where our children are putting down their roots.

In the last few days we’ve been going places “for the last time”, but these are places we’ve lost attachment to as this city has changed. On Thursday morning we walked around Sale Water Park with our very tall son. The January morning light was especially beautiful in the hanging mist, and it felt like a parting gift – part of the process. On Friday morning we spent time with our now much taller and quite thin daughter, partner, and the twin baby girls. Part of the reason we are moving north is because they acquired some land in the Borders where they are to build a house and hopefully a workshop.

It has felt in recent years like Manchester’s spirit of independence and general arseyness has been systematically undermined. A lot of good people have done a lot of good things during our time here, but there’s a sense now of exasperation at losing some of its characteristic regional control. Apart from the first time when it was safe Conservative (and thanks to Boundary changes), every time we’ve voted here we’ve helped to vote in a long-standing Labour MP in a safe seat. Our move takes us into true blue territory, where our votes will once again be used in true opposition. We are moving to a place which is known throughout history for its independence and arsey qualities, and a Tory MP who simply has to go.

There are of course other people we’ll miss dearly, and for it will be a real wrench to not be able to pop round to Ali Karim’s and spontaneously create music. We’ve known each other since late 2015, and my music journey would not have developed without his patience and extreme skill. But he knows he can leap on a train for 5 hours and be 10 minutes’ walk from our new house at the other end of the line. Our work together has only just begun.

I know there will be high emotions leaving here on Tuesday. Our small family is ingrained in the fabric of this house. We are only the third occupants of this 1928 semi-detached, in a road where there has been little change in personnel. We know some of the neighbours we care about will be out to see us off. Our next door neighbours moved in the year before we did, and they’ve been amazing, but all of them know where we will be. The tortuous conveyancing process that has led us to this point only reaffirmed our decision to start a new adventure elsewhere. It was awful. And as we grope towards Tuesday amid dismantled shelving units, piles of books, and equipment and instruments in bags, the parting gifts keep on coming, from the beautiful dawn around the Water Park on Thursday to today’s appearance of our resident fox in broad daylight sniffing around our garden for a place to dig another hole. We leave a garden behind that has attracted wildlife of all kinds, and we look forward to doing the same with our new one.

Peace

John

 

 

The Fleeting Fox

Posted on by John Reed

A few weeks ago, I opened the curtains covering the kitchen back door to see a healthy looking fox looking straight at me from its position about twenty feet away under the pergola. It quickly vanished through the hedge that adjoins next door and I saw its tail disappear over their fence into the back road. The following morning, the bucket we use to collect waste kitchen water, and which had been at least half full the night before, had been tipped over.

On seeing my interest in this very welcome night visitor, my wife bought me a trail camera for my birthday last week and this is what happened on the second night I set it up:

After 34 years in the same house, we have together shaped our front and rear gardens with our personalities. Some would regard our outside space as a bit of a mess, a bit higgledy-piggledy, but there is method in our apparent madness, in our inability to conform.

When we moved in, we inherited square lawns bounded by uniformly spaced rose bushes, but that was from a different time and there was a sterility about the place. A beautiful if dilapidated, wooden garage occupied half of our restricted rear space. It may have been over-engineered to last, but it had by now come to the end of its days. Its place was taken by a wooden octagonal greenhouse, with a shed for my intended wood carving further along our secure drive.  Over the years we have increased both functionality and privacy, but always with an open invitation to insects, garden birds, and other wildlife.

One of the first things we did when we moved in was to install a small pond. The pond quickly attracted frogs and the occasional toad. When we last cleared it out five years ago we counted 188 frogs. In the spring and summer months we are mesmerised by hover flies, mayflies, dragonflies, butterflies moths, and other flying creatures, not least the bees who last year found a way to build a hive between the pond lining and the soil it retains. For several years we had a heron swooping down to claim victims of frog and fish, to the point where we needed to deter. So we constructed a pergola to create height and over a period of years placed sticks in the ground around the pond, harvested from a hazel bush, to prevent landing and take off.

The sticks around the pond have attracted garden birds because they can safely perch there to preen or survey the lie of the land. They drop down to the water and take a bath among the lilies before returning to their perch to shake themselves dry. We leave the seed heads on our plants throughout the winter, and as well as looking stunning after rainfall, these gems supplement the feeders we have hanging from both the rowan tree in the back garden and from a pole enhanced with more hazel sticks in the front.

And now we have our new visitor. It feels really special, like a gift for all our patience, care, and hard work. There are foxes on our allotment two blocks away from here and they are quite bold but look rather straggly. Our garden fox is in significantly better condition, clearly thriving on food waste in these suburban streets. First indications are that our garden is on its nightly run. The photos taken by the motion sensitive trail camera shows it visited between 1am and 2am and spent only a couple of minutes here. So now I need to learn how to use its video settings.

The microcosm we have created here is for the co-existence of all creatures. It is our place of peace in a frenetic world, a place to just be. We do not give ourselves nearly enough time to ‘just be’, but when we sit outside we can lose half an hour just watching, and taking in everything that is going on around us in our small garden. It refreshes and inspires, calms us and teaches us to appreciate the beauty of this life that is so frequently forgotten.

We often use expressions like “it helps us to switch off”, but actually it doesn’t. It helps us to switch back on a part of life we should all get to know more.

 

John Reed – June 2020

 

Grab Yourself an “Inheritance”

Posted on by John Reed

Well the day arrived, and I spent inordinate amounts of time making sure #Inheritance was put out there on the day of its release, but for many musicians this is where the hard work begins. We live to create music and play live, and all the promotional paraphernalia simply gets in the way of that. It is easy to become overawed by it, and to want to sink into your shell.

Last weekend me, Duncan and Matt were fortunate enough to take the 11 hour road trip to the Isle of Skye (as the song now goes “over the bridge to Skye”), where we found mainly good weather and therefore multiple photo and video opportunities, performed our respective songs in front of a camera at Waternish Community Hall, at Waterfall Cottage where we were staying, and by an inlet on the way back to Glendale from Dunvegan.

I was also very pleased at last to meet Steve Clarke of Cuillin FM’s excellent “Strange Brew” and “Start the Weekend” shows and to introduce to him the other miscreants. Steve has been a supporter of my music since I posted The Breeding Ground of Vile to him last year, and our road trip was in part to pay back his support by giving him an exclusive first interview to mark the release of “Inheritance” and in part because I cannot imagine a more beautiful place on earth to launch an album.

Those last few days before a final album release can be difficult. This time around I didn’t listen to the finished work as obsessively as previous releases. I feel completely confident about its quality, so whether people actually like it or not doesn’t matter because they will at least not be able to argue against the quality of the songs, their structure, and Ali Karim’s usual high standard of production. However, artists do need encouragement and kind words, positive reactions to your work, and in Steve’s case the provision of more than half an hour for our music out of his two hour “Strange Brew” broadcast on the eve of the release was more than I could have hoped for.

So when release day finally came along I wondered “well how do I follow that?” and then a post popped up from Neil King at Fatea Magazine to say that “Inheritance” had been selected as the ‘Album of the Week’ for his “Along The Tracks” show on Blues and Roots Radio. Again, this came right out of the blue and I feel hugely privileged that people like Steve and Neil with such immense knowledge of the world of music would give me such profile.

It is their recognition and support, moments like that and people like them which prevents a lot of us from taking a step back from music. We all know how hard it is to make any kind of name in this highly competitive and commercially imbalanced sector, and at times you do wonder why you should not just pack it in and go and dig the allotment instead. There are many more ‘Steve Clarkes’ and ‘Neil Kings’ out there who simply love good music, so hats off to all of them for their unstinting support for independent music. It is hugely appreciated.

And one final note, the support of the Folded Arms (whether or not involved in “Inheritance”), the friendship, encouragement and support of the best producer I could wish for, and the reciprocal support I have received from other musicians, specifically Jo Beth Young who as “Rise” released her album “Strangers” on the same day, is why I have already begun my next creative challenge. Huge thanks to you all!

Peace

 

It’s All In The Song

Posted on by bsa_mar

I will be honest with you. I really struggle with people who care so little for art, literature, or music that they give only a passing glance or listen to work that has been many months, if not years, in the making. I know. It’s always been like it, but that doesn’t make me feel any less irritated by it. Out of respect for other musicians, if they ask me to listen then I listen all the way through. If they don’t, then I may listen through anyway, to at least one of their songs. In doing so, I have found some real gems.

On Monday my wife and I drove up to Watergrove Reservoir. We have had such a dry summer so far that I wanted to see how far the water level had dropped. Watergrove Farm is the second track of my debut album #Moorscape, and I wrote the song almost as an afterthought. I had been writing songs on the theme of the political and social history of the British moorlands, and it finally dawned on me that a landscape so shaped by water probably justified a song about water!

Like many songs mine carry a story. Watergrove Farm is very much a folk song, and its mood is set by a solitary cittern introduction. The valley today is quiet and at times bleak, so I felt that would accurately represent the scene. It’s a sad song, a song about a transient agricultural community that had established a degree of permanence following the construction of four textile mills in the valley. Roads Mill was the longest established, but the first of three constructions of Watergrove Mill was a small building called Water Grove Farm which in 1841 was home to a collective of hand loom weavers and wool spinners.

A village called Watergrove never actually existed. Its name came much later and embraces a collection of hamlets whose small populations served the farms and later the mills. When the valley was inundated by the reservoir in 1938, a total of 200 people were displaced. While the individual hamlets each have their own longer histories, it is generally thought that the collective known as ‘Watergrove’ was in existence for only 100 years.

 

 

There were about 45 farm buildings in the Watergrove valley. Watergrove Farm itself had previously been known as “Lower Marl’d Earth” and it occupied a site on Ramsden Road, the largely intact cobbled main street that still runs down the valley. What remains of Ramsden Road can be seen in these photographs, where at low water the kerbstones as well as the cobbles and some of the paving flags are still visible. The site of third, final, and largest manifestation of Watergrove Mill was on the flat land to the left of the cobbled street in the first picture. My wife’s great grandmother lived with her second husband in a back to back terraced house on the other side of Ramsden Road. The site of the house will be just a few yards under the water line. It is not clear what work the family did there, but they would have lived hard lives in unforgiving terrain.

“God Be With You Till We Meet Again” was the last hymn sung in the village’s Wesleyan chapel before it was closed to make way for Watergrove Reservoir. It felt appropriate to build the chorus of the song around those words because it reflected the temporary activities of many who lived there. Today, this beautiful if bleak location has a feel of ‘lives once lived’.

I hope this short account will give some insight into why I wrote the song in the first place, and that having read this you will be encouraged to listen to the stories behind the songs of the other musicians you listen to. There is so much more depth to art than is ever truly acknowledged, and today we are privileged to have the leisure time to explore and understand art that would have been denied to factory and farm workers of Victorian England as they worked their long and arduous shifts until it was time to sleep. So here is Watergrove Farm, performed by me and #MattSteady at Penwortham’s St. Mary’s Church in May…

 

42 Years Ago and the Music is Still Fresh

Posted on by bsa_mar

Me and Kieran were lucky enough to have been there at Knebworth Park in 1975 when Pink Floyd eventually came on stage to a Spitfire fly past, after they had sorted out their tuning problems and the man who had climbed the very high scaffolding tower holding the model of Thunderbird One finally agreed to descend into the arms of the waiting Police rather than risk the ire of a previously peaceful and largely stoned crowd who had started to get a tad pissed off with him. Thus, Thunderbird One was duly despatched into the stage to explode at the end of On The Run.

42 years later, less about eight weeks, we finally saw some footage of that very concert as we relived a very important part of our music education by visiting Their Mortal Remains exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum. The few shots of the audience showed the sea of blue denim that typified outdoor music events at the time. That extraordinary day cost us £2.25 and it seemed like a fortune at the time but I will challenge anyone to disagree that it was significantly better value for money than today’s obscenely priced festivals where being able to say you were there and pay upwards of £300 months in advance for a weekend lineup as yet undisclosed, where multiple bands are scheduled on and off stage like a production line, where yurts abound and and where those prepared to pay top dollar will find themselves in a cordoned area closest to the stage. Bugger the music.

Few who went to Knebworth 1975 did not go specifically to see Pink Floyd, although the supporting lineup wasn’t bad either: Linda Lewis, Monty Python, Roy Harper, the Steve Miller Band, and Captain Beefheart all put in top performances before the astonishing headline set took us through a couple of numbers that later appear under different names on Animals, then Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon in their entirety. £2.25 for a full day was value for money indeed!

We could have chosen to take the tube on Sunday, but instead we walked from our surprisingly good hotel in Earls Court, via a cracking, affordable breakfast from a farmers’ market in a schoolyard opposite Langham Mansions, and then all the way to the V&A hoping to see 101 Cromwell Road, the house where Syd Barrett lived, en route.

Although many of the grand terraced buildings remained, the one we wanted to see had been replaced by a gruesome Holiday Inn hotel, outside which as a limited area of garden with a shaped hedge that we estimated marked the spot where 101 once stood.

The stunning exhibition took us back into our youth for a magical few hours. Issued with headphones we entered the show to the opening chords of Interstellar Overdrive, and as I pointed at some nostalgic items inside one of the telephone boxes Kieran pointed out that I was shouting…again! As a teenager I had done exactly the same when I was listening to The James Gang Rides Again on Headphones in the record shop in the basement of RHO Hills in Blackpool “What’s it like?” he asked “FUCKING BRILLIANT” I shouted.

This morning, the day after the exhibition should have been a bit of an anti-climax. Our train back to Manchester was at 12:20 so we decided to make something of the morning, and Kieran suggested we might try to find Wetherby Mansions where this photograph of Syd Barrett had been taken. So we looked at a map and found that Wetherby Mansions was on the same road as Langham Mansions, and went there without any thought of what we might do when we found the place. A few daft moments later I took a photo of Kieran stood exactly where Syd stood all those years ago, we think around March 1969 but Mick Rock will know because he took the original!

So a perfectly rounded weekend of nostalgia, with the music living on and feeling as fresh today as it did 42 years ago. And not a yurt in sight.

Ageing Bloke’s Naked Flesh Causes Twitter Outage Shock!

Posted on by bsa_mar

Apart from the aching limbs, I still feel and act like a 20 year old, but I will be 60 in just over a year. When I was actually 20, I thought anyone over the age of 40 was way past it. I never bet, but I did once have a bet with Peter Cam when we were about 16, and the bet was based on a prediction of the age at which each of us would die. No money changed hands, but he reckoned I am destined to peg it when I’m 64. It sounds a bit Sergeant Pepper to me, and I cannot recall what age I predicted for his death. So because I may be pushing up daisies in five years I had better make hay while the sun shines and make loads of music. And when you think about it, I only get his pay out if I survive longer. It’s probably 10p.

THE FOLDED ARMS. LEFT TO RIGHT: EMMA PERRY & KATE FERRIS (CHIQUE), RAJENDRA JADEJA (JAD), KIERAN HEANEY, JOHN REED, & MATT STEADY.

Back then, all people over the age of 30 had the air of someone approaching retirement. Maybe it was the National Health specs, the dowdy overcoats, the Brylcreem and the hairdos, but middle aged men and women rarely bared any flesh below the neck. That was left to male Adonis figures or girls with long legs. I remember walking through Woolworths in Blackpool in my early teens and as I made for the tills with whatever it was I had purchased I was confronted by a clothed Adonis. He was dressed entirely in clinging black clothing, and was clearly a body builder. He had a waist like a Geisha while the rest of his body rippled with muscle and veins, apart from the bits we don’t talk about because they were probably too insignificant to merit mention. Anyway we made eye contact and I just pissed myself laughing. Thankfully he was not the most mobile of body builders because his clothes were too tight, and I was a very fast runner.

Anyway, fast forward to the Internet age, and I find myself regularly having to block scantily clad painted ladies from my Twitter feed. These are very probably hacked or pernicious accounts targeting sad older blokes whose only way of feeling good about themselves is to connect with (Oooer!) young painted things, so I just report and block them and move on. I could not describe them as obscene, but they are not welcome.

However, my arms clearly ARE obscene. We arrived at the name The Folded Arms by accident, and the name was coined after my first gig in 34 years on 30th November last year. The Folded Arms consist of me, Kieran, Jad, Matt, Emma, Kate, and Ali is an honorary member because he just pushes buttons. That evening was the first time we had all been in the same room together so the main photo for this post was taken. A few weeks ago, I was thinking of innovative ways to promote our gigs and, for reasons that will become clear in a few more days, I had the photograph below taken of me folding my arms. Harmless so far? Read on…

I decided to use the folded arms photo on my Facebook music page and to post it on Twitter, which I finally did yesterday as I attempted to set up a secondary music Twitter account. My toasted crumpets were ready just as I had set up the basics, so I left my computer and went into the kitchen to have breakfast, returning no more than 15 minutes later to find that Twitter had locked me out of the new account. I opened up my usual @JohnWaldeaux account and that was working fine, so went back to the new account only to receive a recurring message about a password reset process for which I had to enter my phone number to receive a code that would then allow me back in. The code still hasn’t arrived 30 hours later in spite of repeated attempts. Then today I learned that Matt had also been locked out of his main Twitter account in exactly the same way. Technology eh.

Just before I was locked out of my new account I decided I would post something about my blog at www.waldeaux.com and used the photograph of my folded arms by way of illustration. However, Twitter didn’t like that and posted the a caution in its place. I just repeated the exercise to make sure I wasn’t dreaming this, and under the word EXPERIMENT, the caution reads: “This media may contain sensitive material. Your media settings are configured to warn you when media may be sensitive”.

Although this still has to be explained, I can only conclude that the reason Twitter have banned my arms is that the image contains too high a proportion of naked flesh. Thus my arms fall into the same category as Kim Kardashian’s arse or Beyonce’s overly and repeatedly revealed cleavage, making them possibly the world’s most obscene arms! Either that or someone took a look at them and decided they were really shit arms and should not under any circumstances be displayed.

Well Tough Twitter! I’m afraid me and the band like the name The Folded Arms and as far as I am aware have no problem with its imagery. I can think of imagery and words that would cause significantly more offence, but I don’t think they would help to sell my music much and I am quite a dignified chap really. But I don’t think I will go into that here – this post is clearly quite obscene enough!

 

 

 

 

The Multiple Shower-Bath-Jacuzzi-Radio-Light Show-Elevator-Rocketship-Ablution Robot

Posted on by bsa_mar

This was the view from my 5th floor room in the Royal Hotel and Spa, Pristina, Kosovo where I was training some business people last week for my day job. I was there from Monday evening to Friday morning, and I think I counted about four other guests the whole week. Everything in Kosovo works, kind of. There is air conditioning in the rooms but the electrics are only switched on when guests pop their key card into the activation slot by the door. So, being about 30 degrees outside it felt very much warmer in an enclosed room, and it took about fifteen minutes for my English room temperature to be achieved. But even when temperature was more comfortable in the main part of the room, it remained tropical in the bathroom where the air conditioning had not been allowed to go. However, there was a shower, and this was no ordinary shower…

Pristina…I think it might have been a multiple shower-bath-jacuzzi-radio-light show-elevator-rocketship-ablution robot. Made in China, it had a 12” diameter overhead showerhead, four much smaller 3” heads on either side, and two hand held units, which seemed to indicate it might have been intended as a communal machine. Right in my line of sight as I peered through the sliding doors was a control panel that NASA would have been proud of, but the icons were faded on every button, one of which was a red button. This turned out not to be ‘emergency stop’ or ‘eject’ or ‘start rocket motors’ because when I pressed it the only thing that happened was that it faded in what I assumed was Albanian folk music from a local radio station. Given there were no instructions anywhere on how to operate this beast, it really was going to take a labour of love and a large amount of trial and error just to freshen up.

Having just arrived in the oppressive heat of the hotel room, I was determined to take a shower, then maybe go to the restaurant for a light meal before bed, knowing that the next day was going to be a bit full-on. And as the main part of the room reached that comfortable English temperature, I remained absorbed in this tropical bathroom trying to find a way to get clean. After about twenty minutes of trying every button multiple times, sometimes in combination, I realized that this state of the art highly sophisticated cleaning machine actually didn’t work, and resorted from then on to using an oversized sink that was uncomfortably close to a tiny toilet with a cheap plastic seat. Given that I had earlier phoned Reception to ask ‘Excuse me, can I have some tea bags for my room?’ (which given there was a kettle seemed a not unreasonable request) to receive the answer ‘NO’, I didn’t bother to kick up a fuss. At least all the other people were incredibly nice and great fun to be with!