The Ned Wood Archive

Laying on electric dreams

Usually the first thing you notice about the girls’ room is Phil Oakey. Specifically, Phil Oakey’s voice. That was all on account of Nessie being a big fan of the League. First it was just Being Boiled. On her tape machine. Mostly just that track over and over. Play, press replay, play again. Then after a week or two when Reproduction came out that was all that got played. Empire State Human. That Lovin Feeling. Blind Youth, and so on. That fragile crystalline intro to side 2, Phil Oakey’s tentative vocals on the first track, then the ticking clock/beating heart segue into Lovin Feeling. Those ten minutes will always remind me of Nessie and the girls’ room. I tell her about it. Often. “Do you remember all you ever played was the Human League?” And she says that all she can remember of those first few days at the Doric is me going overboard about the Tours “Language School”.

Nessie was into that Kraftwerk/Human League synth sound. Not so much Orchestral Manoeuvres and Tubeway Army, mind. The better stuff, she said. Plus the Normal and Fad Gadget. She got me into Fad Gadget: Back to Nature. That was out that autumn.

We’d seen Kraftwerk and Birmingham Town Hall back in 75 after Autobahn came out – me, Alex, and our kid – and sort of kept them on the radar for the next two or three albums. But Being Boiled and then TVOD and then Tubeway Army got me listening out again when I was in London. I tried to see the League at the Marquee with my mate Ralph from the Courtauld but we got locked out. Anyways, I recognised Being Boiled the first time I heard it coming out of the girls’ room, so I knocked and introduced myself.

Nessie is Vanessa Fazackerly. Nessie or Fizz for short. Nessie is the one we used most often, but Fizz is probably more appropriate. That’s what she did. Fizzed around the place. This buoyant, excitable, enthusiastic bubble that runs around everywhere trying to do as many things as possible. Over the years, she’s had me kayaking over Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, abseiling off old railway bridges in the Peak District, and climbing up the side of hills all over the place. She even tried to teach me how to snowboard a half pipe, but I failed dismally. She could play football pretty good, too. Had a much better shot on her than I did. She’d got this wonderful long curly hair, like coiled springs, which I guess was also appropriate. Hair the colour of golden syrup that made her look like the sun shining in the evening when she let it down, but she mostly had it tied back, which I guess made sense as she was always doing stuff where the hair would get in your way.

One of those first weekends, she had me go down to some rock near Haddington with the climbing club. One of those clubs you join up in freshers week and then never follow up. I’d done a bit of rock climbing before. At school. They organised a weekend over in Wales so I went along on that. As far as I can recall, most of the sixth formers sat around and drank, so there wasn’t much rock climbing got done. Chopper Truman was on the weekend too and he got me doing some bouldering. That means it must have been in my 3rd or 4th year, cos he was a year above me and he left after the 5th year.

He lived just down the road from us and spent a lot of time with us as kids: 9,10,11,12 that sort of age. Like I say he was a year older, at least. He got me into scouts – his dad ran the scout group and his mom ran the cub scouts, so we probably started messing around together in cubs. We did a lot of camping together, we’d walk up to Cannock Chase and stay there. Not that it was a joint venture. I was always his dogsbody. It’d be “Here hold this, Ned, lad.” or “Here, just go and get us some of this” and so on. Hold the pole while I put up the tent. Get the fire wood and I’ll light the fire. Peel the spuds for us will ya. And building stuff. Outdoor dens, bivvies. Lashing staves together to make huts or climbing frames. “Here, Ned lad. Just hold this pole for us while I make an A frame.” “Here, Ned, lad. Just go and fetch us some ferns to make a roof for this den.”

He would come round and invent new ways to terrify the life out of my Action Man dolls. Once he set up an aerial runway out of my bedroom window and sent an Action Man or a Tommy Gunn down it with a banger in his trousers. One or the other, I don’t recall. Action Man was the one with the scar. They all got sacrificed. There was a galvanised bucket full of petrol at the end of the aerial runway which he set fire to so Action Man/Tommy Gunn got immolated at the end of the ride. Dad used to keep a can of petrol for the lawn mower and was most upset that it got used up.

We played football for the same team for a while. Both of us fullbacks. He was the buckler swashing type – a prototype Stuart Pearce, all sliding tackles and terrorising the winger. That’s how he got one of his nicknames. He had plenty: Chopper Trueman; Fred on account he was from Yorkshire – what else would you expect with a name like Trueman; Major Truman or just the Major, cos of his army fetish – airfix models as well as Action Men. He had me buy them and glue them up and then join in on the painting. And the destruction. “Hey, Ned lad, give me that model and I’ll show you what happens when the Junkers 87 meets the Hurricane”. At football, I was the more cerebral full back- like Gary Charles – winning the ball through speed of thought or speed of foot. I tried a couple of Chopper slide tackles. The first time I missed both ball and player. The second was a little better: I was late for the ball, but cleaned out the winger. I think I got substituted after that and didn’t get to play many times for that team again.

Nessie was the person I knew that most resembled Chopper. Loved to be outdoors doing rough stuff. Preferred canvas over her head to slate or tile. The sort who looked at a rock face or a hill or a trig point and wanted to climb up it. The sort who looked at a fence or hedge and wanted to climb over it. The sort who looked before they leaped, but no matter what they saw, jumped anyway and accepted the scars and the bruises and the cuts and the breaks as campaign medals.

It was Nessie that arranged a day in Wales some time later. Llangollen, I think, when we went kayaking over that massive aqueduct at Pontcysyllte. Wow, that was fun. Imagine canoeing in a long tin bath. There’s a towpath on the right hand side and some railings, but on the other side, the canoe goes right up to the edge of the bath and you look over the side all the way down to the river below. If that doesn’t give you vertigo, nothing will. At each end of the bridge, the canal widens out into a pool – I guess this is the waiting area for any boats wanting to go across. When we got back to the pool at the end of our trip, Nessie did a couple of eskimo rolls in her canoe.

It’s easy enough to roll your canoe. You just have to remember a couple of things. Actually, three things, the first being to hold onto your paddle. You’re gonna use your paddle to get your canoe upright, so the other two things are

• (before you go underwater), get your right arm into the right position to control the paddle – viz across your body in front of your left arm, and
• (when you are upside down underwater) get your paddle into the right position – viz at right angles to the canoe with the blade (and right hand) farthest away from you and horizontal so that it has the biggest leverage.

Then all you need to do is straighten yourself using your muscle power to pull your right arm and the paddle blade and the water over your head. So by now they should all be back in the correct place on your right hand side. And, all being well, you’ll be able to breathe again.

Anyway, that’s the theory. You can’t learn how to roll by reading about it, you just have to try it and get into the hang of it. Nessie did her rolls naturally, not to show off but as a celebration, to show her excitement at having such fun. I’d learned how to roll at school, so I decided I’d impress her. Nessie is the sort of person you’d want to impress. I got her attention and tried to roll.

It’s all well and good knowing the theory, but like I say, it’s a knack. If your muscles have forgotten what they need to do and if your arms have forgotten where, exactly, they need to be, then no amount of hard slog is going to get you upright. I got myself upside down OK, but, after a couple of attempts to right myself, I had to give up and slide out of the kayak. And do the wade of shame to the bank, dragging my inverted kayak, now taking on canal water.

And to impress Nessie even more, I had her help me drain the kayak and had her help me get back in and had her watch me fail all over again.

So, right now, Nessie is sharing this room which is no bigger than the boys room with Sarah and Maggie and Cat and Fi and some other lass whose name I’ve forgotten. Cat and Fi I saw a lot of after we left the Doric; Sarah, Maggie, and the other lass not so much. And the good news is that, right now, Ness has a tape machine and has some decent tapes, so we can listen in to them in the evening and annoy everyone else.

So that’s how we bonded. Those electronic drum sounds popping and fizzing and Phil Oakey’s spoken invitation to start the revolution. “OK ready, let’s do it.” Then the rhythm getting going and the synths coming in. Then the lyrics, whatever they mean. “Listen to the voice of Buddha saying stop your sericulture.” Huh? What’s sericulture when it’s at home? But that is partly what made all of that electronic such such fun. It had to be a bit way out. And that was the first track on one of Nessie’s mix tape. That’s where the fun started.

One great thing about finding a music buddy is the stuff that you’ve got in common. Like me and Nessie with the Human League. Like me and Bernie with the Ramones. Another great thing, which is even more important, is the stuff you don’t have in common. Either stuff you disagree about and you can argue all day long about. Or stuff that you don’t know yet and get introduced to. Like when Bernie introduced me to Television. Or Alex back home who got me into the Ramones and Patti Smith that summer before I met Bernie.

Alex was an interesting dude because we agreed about very little until we both left home. Maybe just the Who and Alex Harvey. He wasn’t into the Stones or Mott the Hoople. When we were at school, he was into all those bands our kid liked. Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. Deep Purple. Black Sabbath. Yes. Music being tribal back then, I was duty bound not to like them. I got into a bit of Zeppelin later, but I still can’t get on with Yes or Pink Floyd. Except Wish You Were Here which probably shows me up as one of those weird sort of folk that only like the wrong songs of a particular artist. Like those folk who only like Shiny Happy People. Oh yeah, we both liked Genesis though.

So we’d argue all the time: me and Alex and our kid. Usually me versus Alex and our kid. And then I left home and while I was away, he got into Patti Smith and the Ramones. And then he left home and went up to Liverpool and changed completely.

So, Nessie’s tape had Dalek I Love You, Freedom Fighters on it. And Fad Gadget, Back to Nature. So that’s two bands she got me into, although I would probably have got into Dalek I Love You anyway given the Teardrops/Orchestral Manoeuvres connections.

And Kraftwerk. And Roxy Music. Is it a given that if you like Roxy’s first albums, you’ll like bands like Human League? Does Roxy lead you to Harmonia to Neu? I guess it depends how adventurous you are. I went forward from Pyjamarama to the B side, the Pride and the Pain, to Brian Eno’s solo stuff to Brian Eno’s experimental stuff to Harmonia and all points east. Nessie went backwards and discovered Another Green World.

The other interesting thing is that once I’d clocked Nessie as a being into synth groups, I didn’t expect her to be so sporty. Just my narrow mind, I guess. What’s your image of a Human League fan? All grey suits and short hair and maths degrees? Maybe there is some overlap between musical taste and appearance because you start picking up the fashions. Like suits because of Brian Ferry or the Jam. Like all that double denim those Quo fans wore. Like punk styles and Northern Soul styles. But there ain’t always a link between football and music. Bernie wasn’t that interested. Alex and our kid weren’t.

So that’s what we talked about, me and Nessie. Human League, Ultravox, Kraftwerk. All that sort of music. What we liked, how we got into it. The sort of discussions I’d have with Bernie and Alex. Actually better than with Alex because we were always competitive about what we liked. Point scoring. There wasn’t any of that with Nessie. And she never got into arguments with the other folk about music. She’d never react when Pall told her that John Foxx or the Human league had got no soul or when Fi told her that it was all just pop and she should listen to something punkier instead. She never rose to any of that baiting that Pete did either, just smiled sweetly and said “You’re probably right.”

We neither of us liked Tubeway Army much. Well, maybe we did like them, but we didn’t love them. I mean, Down in the Park and Are Friends Electric have all the hallmarks of great synth singles… ominous chords, futuristic themes, atmosphere, squigly keyboard runs … but we never connected, either of us. Was it Numan’s lame whinging whining voice? Was it the fact that everyone was buying their stuff? Was it too “pop”?

She’d got into Dogs era Bowie and Country Life era Roxy. First albums she’d bought, she says. Out of the Blue (though we both agree the live version on Viva is better – where Eddie Jobson goes wild), Prairie Rose, Thrill of it all . Candidate, We are the Dead, Big Brother. And from there backwards …. Earlier Bowie – Ziggy, Aladdin Sane; earlier Roxy, especially the first two albums. Then onto the Velvets, like everyone else who ever heard Bowie and Iggy did.

Then to Eno and his stuff, but not Seven Deadly Sins – that was harder to get hold of. Another Green World – that meant you were on the inside… in the know. Then from Eno to krautrock. Kraftwerk, obviously, but also some serious stuff you had to get on import. Stuff I had heard of but hadn’t heard played. Stuff some of the serious dudes at school name dropped. Neu: the first album: Hallogallo such a deadly groove… Harmonia: the second album: the delights of Immer Wieder, Walky Talky, all of it.

And from them to anyone who name checked them or sounded influenced by them. Ultravox – Hiroshima Mon Amour the highlight; Human League, trying out Numan and Orchestral Manoeuvres. Even Visage. She was split on Orchestral Manoeuvres. Said Electricity was too trite. Too much like an ice cream van’s chime. The other side – Almost – she liked that. Had more character. More to get into. Electricity was pop. That was an argument we had. Pop could be a compliment or an insult.

After she’d played me some of the Kraftwek and stuff she had, I told her that Radioactivity or Immer Wieder were pop. Great melodies like Electricity. She didn’t buy that though. I played her Popcorn, Hot Butter, but she didn’t like that either.

Picking up on the Normal…. Other offbeat stuff. Fad Gadget, Cabaret Voltaire, then onto the Mekons … the Raincoats … and Joy Division and the Banshees eventually, although she tells me they both took some time.

But we couldn’t listen to them that often apart from the Banshees cos her room mates didn’t really get on with that obscure experimental industrial side of things. So it was just the League and the Banshees and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Not bad though.

And when the Human League’s album came out, Nessie bought it, and got a mate of hers in Pollock to copy it onto tape so we could listen to it at the hotel. So we listened to it track after track. We listened to Circus of Death over and over and decided it wasn’t as good as on the single. Then we grooved to Empire State Human over and over and walked out along Newington Road singing about how tall we were, cos she came to the Brattisani with us sometimes. And we all thought it was hilarious singing about being tall because Nessie is even smaller than I am. Only Pete was fourteen stories high. At least. Then we fell in love with You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling, including the spooky intro that they tacked on. And so on, getting heavily into each track one at a time. Hazy cosmic jive.