![leabridge_250w[1].jpg](http://www.darrenlock.com/leabridge_250w%5B1%5D.jpg)
Woolworths at Lea Bridge Road, Leyton
So the very last Woolworths stores are closing today. My career began in the Woolworths at Bakers Arms in Leyton. Happy times. Due to my charm and dashing good looks (no really), I was put to work behind the record bar dishing out LPs, 45s and 12 inches left, right and centre. It was here that I met the Missus and we worked together for a while before she left for pastures new and then we continued our friendship.
I used to joke how we’d probably have been better off staying at Woolworths and that we’d probably have ended up managing our own store by now. Ooops…got that wrong. It is a shame because I used to go and spend money in that shop on a regular basis but cash-flow is a big fat horrible cow of a beast.
Instead of wasting our money on the war on terror and sending our own soldiers to be blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government could have bailed out these retailers who are going to the wall. It could have prevented the rise of unemployment and honest, hard-working folks losing their livlihoods and eventually their homes.
Oh well. To better, more innocent and exciting times. Working at Woolworths all those years ago was one of the reasons I wanted my own shop because I loved dealing with the customers. But those times have changed and then you realise that Leyton is very different from Norfolk.
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My article for the Retail Newsagent appeared in this week’s edition. I’ll PDF a version of it when I have the time. It is a good edit according to The Missus. This pleases me as I rarely ever read anything again that I’ve written (how poncey is that?). The article is entitled “Diary of a Disaster” and explains exactly what we’ve been through, though I have excluded a lot of the shitty, nasty, personal stuff.
Well a new year is upon us and I know it has to be better than the last one? Plans are drawn, the future is pretty much mapped out for the first quarter of the year. For the first time ever, we have a good idea of what we are trying to achieve in the coming year and my new year’s resolution should be easy (and a joy) to keep.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get around to recording some more music!!!
My first bass guitar was an Encore Coaster bass, which I still have. I bought it when I was seventeen from Allan Marshall Guitars in Markhouse Road, Walthamstow and learnt the rudiments on this instrument. I didn’t have a bass amp, so I just played “acoustically” until I got a guitar amp for Xmas, buy my folks had forgotten to buy me an instrument cable so I could connect my guitar to my amp, so I sat there over the Christmas holidays just staring at this silent amplifier. Ho, ho, ho!
My first electric guitar was a second hand Columbus Les Paul Studio copy which I also bought from Allan Marshall Guitars for about £50 in 1990. This guitar weighed a tonne, but had some great sustain. Not sure if I ever recorded with this guitar – I might have used it on my early recordings, but I upgraded that guitar to a Yamaha in 1992. The Columbus eventually got sold at a car boot sale for about £80, so I ended with a profit. Hurrah!
The Yahama guitar I used right up until 1997 was an RGX model, but it was unique in the fact that it had a removable clear PVC pickguard that covered the whole face of the guitar, the intention of which was that you could mount your own custom graphics under said pickguard. So I cut up some pages from a Roger Dean “Views” book that I had and mounted those making it a suitably “Prog” custom guitar. Eventually, I got bored with this and during my “hippy-punk” phase I remember making a montage from loads of small pictures of naked ladies snipped from appropriate magazines in an ill thought-out homage to Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland” LP – it was meant to be shocking, but probably looked more sleazy than anything. So after one outing to a band audition, it got trashed. Oh, the folly of youth! I cringe with embarrassment now, but heck, this is the Internet – no-one is reading this, are they?
In terms of electric guitar FX, the very first pedal I got was a Zoom 9000 multi-effects unit. The remarkable thing about this little gadget was that it was about the size of two packets of cigarettes, yet it was a formidable FX unit. It featured digital effects and all manner of settings to tweak and this was my first introduction to digital stereo delay: an effect that I swear by and rely on to thicken up my overall guitar sound and to hide my dodgy playing. Remembering back, I marvel at what Zoom were able to do with such a small device back in the early 1990s. I remember showing it to a fellow guitarist who came over to play once and he was completely blown away by the device. This is when I realised that guitarists aren’t that technologically savvy and tend to rely on huge racks of amps to get their sound. While I prefer to use electronic FX to get the same result.
![zoom9000-2[1].jpg](http://www.darrenlock.com/zoom9000-2%5B1%5D.jpg)
Zoom 9000
Of course, if you are going to record by yourselves in the early 1990s, a drum machine was par for the course. I settled on an Alesis HR-16B, which to this day is one of the best drum machines I’ve used, mainly for the simplicity of programming. I’m not the greatest drum programmer, so if I can’t pick up the unit and get a rhythm going immediately, I will give up quickly. I remember everyone raving about the Alesis SR-16 has being superior, and it was in terms of sounds, but when it comes to programming the HR-16 was pure gold. I got rid of that piece of kit when I traded in a load of stuff to get a Digitech multi-FX pedal from Hertford Music in Hertfordshire. The HR-16B had some cool sounds of its own and was quite expressive for a drum machine.
![hr16b[1].jpg](http://www.darrenlock.com/hr16b%5B1%5D.jpg)
Alesis HR-16B
That’s the problem with the whole recording bug, you tend to end up buying new equipment and constantly trading up. Nasty business… 🙂
As it is coming to the end of the year, there is a tendancy for you to get a little reflective and nostalgic for times passed. I realised that I created a section of my blog to look at the various equipment I’ve used and I’ve ignored this section completely. So this is my attempt at redressing the balance.
My dubious recording career began around 1990 when I went to college and spunked a percentage of my grant cheque on my first piece of serious recording gear. It was a Vestax MR-44 four-track tape recorder. In those days, I used to read Sound on Sound magazine religiously (and I still do) and I can say that I’ve learnt all I know about sound recording from that publication. Anyway, I remember seeing a review for the MR44 and deciding that this was the recorder for me for reasons long forgotten. The thing was that multi-track recorders cost a fortune back then and I needed something that was within my budget.
![3e_1_sbl[1].jpg](http://www.darrenlock.com/3e_1_sbl%5B1%5D.jpg)
The Monster MR44
Again, I can’t remember who I ordered the unit from, but this was before the Internet and I sent a cheque and my order via the Royal Mail. And then I waited and waited and waited and waited. There was no “next-day” delivery in those days – people had to wait for cheques to clear and the statement “Please allow 28 days for delivery” was the watchword. So the rule of thumb was to leave it a month before complaining because invariably the assistant on the end of the phone would always snide at you: “Well you haven’t left it 28 days yet…”
So after about six weeks I walked to the phonebox and gave them a call. Again, in those days mobile phones were the size of a small child and only Yuppies could afford to own and run them, and we didn’t have a telephone. I called the shop and my MR44 had been sitting there for six weeks for some unknown reason – the cheque had been cashed, but the recorder hadn’t been sent to me. So I politely complained and it arrived two days later. Internet shoppers today don’t know they’re born! 🙂
My immediate memory of the Vestax MR44 was that it felt as if it had been salvaged from a Russian submarine. It’s design had what only could be described as a Soviet aesthetic and it had the same solid reliability of a breeze block. The buttons were small and there was an equally small LED tape counter – no fancy display screens or touch sensitive panels. The buttons clunked and clattered when you engaged the unit to record as if a series of pulleys and gurneys were being rattled into place.
There were four sturdy volume sliders and EQ knobs to play with. In terms of sound quality, the unit was pretty neat and I spent much time bouncing down rhythm tracks and putting together silly little songs. In total, I think I recorded four CDs worth of material with this four-track, reasoning that The Beatles had recorded “Sgt Peppers” with just four tracks of recording power. What I forgot was that they were consumate musicians, they had the facilities of Abbey Road at their disposal and talent of George Martin behind the desk.
Ahhh, the foolishness of youth!
The idiots of the village continue to snicker and bicker and spread all manner of untruths about our situation. As our neighbour remarked to us: “It doesn’t matter if you have anything to do with these people, even if you keep yourselves to yourselves – they’ll still make things up about you.”
Ahh, the petty small-mindedness of village life. So the first rumour that emerged since the incident was that my mother had died of a heart attack as a result of it. This I find amusing as her condition as “unhurt” had been reported in the local press, so I put it down to the local kids’ wishful thinking.
Another good rumour was that my mother had stormed into the Co-Op store (which like every good unethical business has decided to profit on our misery by starting to stock newspapers for the first time, but claiming that they are helping us as we can’t keep our regular hours. Not true, you mealy-mouthed cunts, you are stealing my trade for ourselves. Kick a man while he’s down, why don’t ya?”) and thrown all their newspapers into the street.
The source of that rumour was my mother herself. She remarked, cheefully laughing, that if she had it in her she would go into the Co-Op and do the self-same thing: throw all their papers into the street, such was her consternation at our plight. It’s an off-the-cuff remark, but the drooling idiots that populate this place grab hold of it and spread it as truth. Morons.
So now the newest rumour was that in fact a body had been found in the rubble. A body had been buried in the walls. My mother heard this from a customer and a day later a different customer came in with a much more macabre variation of this: it was a baby’s body buried in the walls that had been discovered by the police. Whoever is spreading this shit is sick in the head.
No-one died, no newspapers have been thrown into the street and, more importantly, no baby’s remains have been found on site.
Twats…
In the past week I’ve finally “gotten my shit together” and gone about replacing the lost rear speakers and speaker stands from my home cinema system. They fell out of the window/disappeared after the recent incident and it is a good lesson to make sure you have all four walls attached to your home. Remember people, losing a wall isn’t cool or clever. You can go around saying that your property is “open plan” but losing a wall is dangerous as your worldly possession can fall out and worst of all, numpty little scrotes can stare in.
I like to say that our house is in “mint” condition – in that, it has a hole in it. (Of course, that joke won’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t come into contact with the humble Polo mint).
Anyway, speakers, stands and replacement cable were purchased and I set up my system again. At the beginning of this month, I’d purchased the Genesis 1970-1975 boxset, the final in the series that features the band’s first five albums all remixed and remastered in 5.1 surround sound. I had been looking forward to this for a long time and, in the case of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album, nearly a decade since the first idea of a surround sound mix was mooted by the band. So forget about the near death experience, forget about the damage and the emotional turmoil – no, the thing that’s really pissed me off lately is not being able to hear these albums as I’d intended.
Today, I found myself working through the said boxset with baby Verity snuggled up against my incredible bulk and then I realised that this was bliss. My first moment of true serenity and stillness in the past month and do you know what? It felt good, my friend, it felt very good indeed.
Here’s a clip of the band talking about their first “proper” album, Trespass:
Anthony Phillips is my hero – swoon!