You can blame Liz Truss. I certainly do.
Her speech about the UK possibly sending warplanes to Ukraine threw a switch somewhere in my dodgily-wired head, and suddenly I was humming the elderly song that appears, with haphazard recent video, on YouTube if you click here. Then I was scrabbling about in the ‘M’ section of the album collection, realising that my copy of the LP Weimar, by one Tom Morton, was missing its lyric booklet, and ordering another (“pristine, virtually unplayed”) copy off eBay, from someone in Peebles.
I can’t bear to listen to all, or indeed much of that record, which was released (or allowed to escape) exactly 40 years ago. It arrived as life as I knew it then was beginning to crumble apart. There’s a desperation and queasy earnestness about many of the songs. An overreaching for insight. Redundant certainties. Bad jokes. Fatuous parallels.
But it has its moments. Ricky Ross from Deacon Blue always said Over the River was OK (“you should edit the chorus”), and the album has the first-ever Ross cover version, in the form of his early song Surprised By Joy. It features some lovely guitar playing from Graeme Duffin. I was coming to the end of a time living in the Overtoun House Christian community near Dumbarton, and the album aspires to some of the notions held by leaders Alistair McIndoe and David Tate of “being prophetic”. I know, I know…
But that’s another story.
Weimar was recorded in an old railway arch in Whiteinch, Glasgow. My old pal Sandy Murdoch had persuaded George Russell, managing director of the meat company Euroscot, to fund a Christian record company, and I was in charge. Singles were released by the 1981 Luis Palau Crusade Choir, Isabel Lindsay, and the Lanarkshire choir New Horizon. There was just enough cash for me to make a very cheap album of my own songs.
The Arches (no relation to the later danceteria under Central Station) was run, appropriately enough, by someone called Archie. I never found out his second name. It reeked of damp, fags and dope, had an old Ampex one-inch 8-track tape recorder, an H&H 16-channel mixing desk, a Revox mastering 2-track and for reverb, a WEM Copycat tape echo even older than the Ampex. The most expensive microphone there was a Shure SM58. I loved the idea of recording somewhere so primitive. As said, too frequently at the time, it was a lot more sophisticated than Sun Studios, Memphis was in 1955. Also wetter and colder.
I had recorded an album, Out of the Harbour, in 1980 at Kirkland Park in Strathaven, Sydney Devine’s studio; this was housed in the function suite of a hotel and had some really good 16-track equipment. However, when Northern Irish producer Andy Kidd arrived he discovered that the speakers had been wired out of phase; several Steak and Kidney albums had been recorded and mixed that way. I’ll never forget the all-night mixing session for Out of the Harbour, while a stag night, complete with strippers, rampaged away next door…
Graeme Duffin and I had been playing together since Graeme returned from his European stint touring with the excellent folk band New Celeste, and Out of the Harbour was really made as a duo, with Derek Clark, Norrie Craig and David MacLachlan. For Weimar, Graeme agreed to play and co-produce, and his brothers Malcolm and Stuart played drums and bass respectively, though most of the record is acoustic. Norrie Craig came in to do some synth work, notably on the title track.
It was rushed - a week, from 17 December 1981, including mixing and editing. Archie wasn’t confident about chopping the quarter-inch master into a format suitable for cutting an album. Neither was I, but I got out a razorblade and did it anyway. Steep learning curve doesn’t begin to cover it. There was blood and leader tape everywhere.
Listening back, it’s like a very basic, very raw demo. Vocals fade in and out, the bass is too loud (what were the monitors? I think it was wee Acoustic Research AR18s, which would account for pumping up Stuart’s Fender fretless so much). Malcolm’s Copeland-influenced drumming is great, and Graeme plays as well as ever.
We pressed just 400 copies of Weimar. Most were sold at gigs and by mail order. It is extremely rare, but not, I think, particularly desirable. £17 should get you one if you scan the internet. I’ll sign it if you like. It might then be worth, oh, I dunno. £17.
Graeme went on to fame and fortune with Wet Wet Wet; Stuart is one of Scotland’s most eminent printmakers and painters. Malcolm died tragically young in a motorcycle accident. Norrie played with my pal Phil Blakeman in the late-80s Glasgow band Farewell Parade and still makes music.
Forty years ago, we did this. Today, theoretically, you could produce the whole thing - recording and editing - on a smartphone. This record has all the reeking damp, the fizzing microphones, the razorblade tape-cutting, the clank and whirr of old machinery…all that was down and dirty, cheap, old analogue in 1981. You can hear the air shifting.
Where’s Archie now? I don’t know. Meanwhile, Liz Truss is the Foreign Secretary. Really. I know, I can’t believe it either.
One week? Rushed? Most of the everyday Pantry Christian productions were done in just one weekend: Saturday = twelve backing tracks and all instrumental overdubs; Sunday = all vocals including overdubs and then the mixing!
Heavens! Enjoy