This is the story of my first attempts at songwriting which were in collaboration with my school friend. It begins in 1986. I was 16. Our music gained a bit of popularity among people we knew and we performed live a few times at parties and such. The story is also about our friendship and the things I was living through at the time.

Who were the Chimney Sweeps? Well, that’s a good question. Thank you for asking. To tell the story I need to start at the beginning.

Waiting for buses. The rain. Waiting for buses in the rain. That was a big part of it.

The funniest thing was always anticipating things way beyond the stage we were at – like whether we’d ever sell out and do stadium gigs when we couldn’t even replace a broken guitar string.

“He doesn’t wear a trench coat

On his back.”

“Tomorrow never comes.

Oh! No, no, no.

Cause I’m too Goddam lazy … to get outta bed.”

The Chimney Sweeps existed from the start of my second year of A-levels through to us both failing our A-levels. Then the year we retook A-levels. When we were finally free of the damn A-levels, The Chimney Sweeps were over and we went our separate ways to higher education. To the dreaming spires of Portsmouth and Birmingham.

Me

To set the scene and get a few things off my chest, I’m starting off with a description of my life up to that point. I was facing a few problems and my life was pretty lacking in light. Thinking about the grief and anxiety that was the background of my story, it seems to contrast with the laughter, camaraderie and creativity I managed to find eventually. Just before this time in 1983, my mum had divorced her second husband and we’d lived as a single parent family for a few years. Mum was working shifts as a nurse and me and my brother would let ourselves in the house after school and make our own dinners. Then she married again and moved us from Dulwich in South London, where we’d grown up, to West London to live with her new husband.

First, we went to Northolt to live in his house, then a year later to Acton where they bought a house together – and where they live to this day. I don’t like the word ‘stepfather,’ by the way, so I always refer to him as John. My father died before I was born, so father is a word I’ve never accepted as relevant to me. Any word conjoined with it makes me feel very uncomfortable. Plus the ‘step’ prefix brings to mind evil fairy tale characters. The idea that I have to apply the word father to a random person – somebody my mother has decided to marry – feels horrible. Like being forced to say something intimate about a stranger.

During the Christmas holiday of 1985 my brother had a nasty argument with John and walked out. My brother is three years older than me. His exit was prompted by a combination of the TV schedules and John’s temper. The Wizard of Oz was coming on TV and we wanted to watch it. John, however, had decided that this was the time we all had to sit together to eat dinner. So two unstoppable forces met, and the result was I had to live there without my brother’s company from then on, making life even more bleak than it already was. My brother and I had not got on well for a number of years, but we had begun to relate to each other better as we realised that we shared a lot of the same problems. Now I didn’t know a living soul in West London, and I had no interests that could take me out and help me establish ties outside the house. I had a lot of irrational fears and obsessions to deal with too, so I expended a lot of energy working through these problems.

At the age of 10 I had developed OCD and was in the grip of fears that I had sold my soul to the devil unwittingly. I first felt this terror when my Auntie Diana described The Exorcist to me. It must have tapped into a primal religious fear. My fear was cemented when I saw the abysmal film The Devil and Max Devlin in 1981. I’d like to say that the idea of a demonic pact was introduced by my reading of Faust at the age of 11, but no. It was this piece of cinematic shit. At the peak of my satanic possession obsession, I felt like I had to carry out hundreds of ridiculous rituals to stave off tragedies that would otherwise befall my loved ones. Some of these were touching wood, making the sign of the cross, avoiding looking at my reflection in mirrors, saying short, clipped prayers while claustrophobically finding a glimpse of sky to see infinity, making even movements with my body parts – e.g., tensing each kneecap, or touching my fingers together an even amount of times – 4 times, 8 times, 16 times … And I had really bad acne.

I bought Everything But the Girl’s LP Eden, which came out in June 1984. I listened to it over and over. It was like life in a boring suburb expressed in beautiful music. It was the first music I’d found that made me feel like a real person and gave me an idea of a nice future for myself. The acoustic guitars and jazz influence were far away from the sound of commercial music at the time, and they were nothing like alternative indie music. It helped me find my voice which seemed like a large part of the solution. Next on the list was to find a girlfriend. Or just have a normal conversation with a girl.

South London

My brother headed back to South London and found a place to live, first in a squat with an old friend in Oval, then sharing a flat with another old friend in Wilton House on the Dog Kennel Hill Council Estate in Denmark Hill. This was right back in the area where we lived as children. I began taking regular trips there and staying for the weekend. The move to West London and the separation from my childhood home made South London a kind of Paradise Lost for me. Now my brother was giving me a sanctuary from the gloomy life in Acton and showing me an exciting new world of music and characters. He’d done his first years of secondary school at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich and made friends with some great people who he had hooked up with again when he returned. I gradually got to know them all and it felt like every day there I would meet another amazing personality. They were happy times. My brother was writing songs and it showed me that I could do this too.

At that time London Transport still hadn’t replaced all of its lovely Routemaster buses with horrible uncomfortable modern ones. You could board the 12 in East Acton and travel comfortably – if a bit slowly – all the way to the magical land of South London, where the air and the pace of life were deliciously rich and slow. The buses had amazing suspension and you could actually read books without being thrown around or being sonically violated by other people playing their phone audio as if they’re in their own living room – as one is today.

At my brother’s we would spend hours talking and listening to music, staying up until all hours smoking and giggling, playing and writing songs on guitars, making cups of tea with soya milk every half an hour and visiting friends around the area. Quite a few were living in squats. There was a huge house in Camberwell, 15 Baldwin Crescent, with about ten bedrooms – all occupied by interesting characters.

This is me, above, standing on the corner of County Grove and Baldwin Crescent. The house is now converted into flats and you can see the main first floor front room in this estate agent site now converted from its Bohemian glory into something extremely bland. I used to get my haircut free in Vidal Sassoon’s school up town in Brook Street. Fast forward to today and you will see that nature has decided I am to live the next half of my life without any meaningful vestige of this crowning glory, but I don’t complain. Hair is a pain to look after and is, after all, a fire hazard.

The people in this circle of friends back then were a few years older than me and were living an alternative to conventional lifestyle. There was a great positive energy. I was introduced to a whole new universe of ethical, cruelty free consumer products – Ecover washing up liquid, Tartex pâté on toast (to be consumed at three in the morning), and of course plentiful cups of tea with soya milk – I was converted for life. I suppose it was an evolution of the 60s communal living scene. Most of the people I was closest to were just middle class young people who didn’t want to join the rat race. I was always a bit scared of hard core new age travellers and felt that I always stood out at Squat parties and raves – such as the night at the Peckham Dole House – pronounced Dole ‘ouse – where me and Tim saw in the 90’s at new year. I found it all a bit scary and experienced flashbacks when I watched a reminiscent scene a few years later in the film Matrix Reloaded. See below:

Post-apocalyptic debauchery redolent of the Peckham Dole ‘ouse

Tartex = anarchist’s caviar

Peckham Dole House, as it was known, used to be the Department for Health and Social Security building in Collyer Place off Peckham High Street. It is a huge building that was ‘squatted’ by adventurous anarchists and turned into a club for like-minded people – a kind of alternate Stringfellows but with a zero tolerance approach to health and safety.

My brother’s music tastes weren’t typical of anarchist culture. The music I remember hearing most from his collection were The Style Council, Big Audio Dynamite, and De La Soul. These were played a lot and take me right back to the time when I hear them. Plus, he listened to a lot of good 60s stuff like The Doors and Love. I remember listening to his single of Aretha Franklin singing I say a Little Prayer on his stereo. I felt like I was in the grooviest place in the world and the music had me in its arms. The 60s, black singers, America, the working people of the housing estate where he had his squat – suddenly it didn’t seem far away anymore. I was welcomed in. I was in the groove.

St Pauls School for Boys

After we moved to west London, I carried on going to school in Central London, Pimlico Comprehensive. Now I just travelled to it from West London. The journey was just as long from Acton as it had been from Dulwich in the South. Both ways I had to sit for hours on London Transport. I had a handful of good friends at the school but it wasn’t a fun place for me. I spent 5 years watching badly behaved kids from council estates getting told to be quiet and sit down when we should have been learning. I never knew until I started school there that I was posh. I remember two girls stopped me on the stairs and asked me a random question. When I answered them they turned to each other and laughed. They just wanted to hear me speak. One said to the other ‘I told you he was posh, didn’t I!’ I’d never heard of an estate before I started there. For a second I thought they might have all been landed gentry. I was lucky to grow up in Dulwich and go to a junior school where the other kids would stay seated and listen to the teacher. Back there I was the naughty one. Now I was like a frightened little Mark Lester in Oliver among a crowd of little Artful Dodgers. Pimlico was a massive culture shock and didn’t do me many favours.

After finishing O-Levels at Pimlico, and after my mother’s previous husband had in the meantime died and left me a bit of money, I told her I wanted to go somewhere better and was prepared to pay for it from the money I’d inherited. So she found a fee paying private school nearer Acton, St Pauls Boys School in Barnes. I was to make a Gulliver-like transition from one extreme world to another. The culture at St Pauls was very different to the inner city bad comprehensive. My academic skills were sorely wanting in comparison to most others there, and if you didn’t fit the right standard at St Pauls you were left alone to fail academically – as I and many of the excellent friends I made there did.

So at 16 and after having done OK at O-Levels, I made a big change and started at this strict, posh school over Hammersmith Bridge in Barnes. Back into a blazer, shirt and tie. Life at St Pauls put me in some very difficult straits. I knew very early on that it wasn’t going to help me pass my next level of study – A-levels. God knows how I was allowed to coast along towards failure. I would spend my days desperately trying to appear like I knew exactly what I was doing when in fact I was pretty lost. But I became quite comfortable with this fantasy. I felt it was all I’d ever be able to manage, and maybe even my specialist area. So I learned to cherish it as my personal niche. I was Walter Mitty there. And I started to be Walter Mitty everywhere I went.

Always a pleasure to walk across Hammersmith Bridge.

I didn’t have the courage to change schools again. I felt like all my energy was spent getting through the day – there was no way I’d do all that homework when I got back. I sometimes had to do an all-night session to catch up when I left things to the last minute. I was just going through the motions, doing the bare minimum, hiding the terrible secret that I was certain to fail. I sat through boring history lessons for two years and never learned a thing – except how to waste time. I just had to stay quiet and pretend I was taking notes.

I had expected there to be a few Flashman type bullies around such a posh school but apart from a bit of snideness the boys were generally quite timid. I never felt challenged as I had expected to be coming from a school with a very different social status.

Alan Cox

One of the good bits of St Pauls was the friends I made there. And my greatest experience at St Pauls was acting in Mr Robson’s production of The Taming of the Shrew with my friend Alan Cox. I remember first connecting with him one day when he saw my harmonica and asked to have a go. After a couple of seconds, he stopped suddenly and said, ‘Do you smoke?’ He’d tasted the tarry residue I’d been breathing into it. I was terrified a teacher would hear him and another of my terrible secrets would be out. Alan and I would go on to have many fun adventures together of which smoking would be an integral part. We became a double-act.

Two Alans

Here I am at school with the fabulous Alan Cox. Notice his arm is placed in front of me. This shows his ever present urge to upstage anyone he’s with. Alan is an actor. His first steps were trodden on the boards. I’m allowing myself to rib him slightly in the knowledge he’ll never read this. I do believe that he is a remarkable person endowed with charisma beyond any human I have ever met. He was in those days worldly beyond his years having been thrust by his well-connected family into Thespian life. He showed me how to order a jug of beer at Henry J Beans and leave your card behind the bar. Never mind that I didn’t have a bank card. A high point of our adventures was the time we went into Godolphins girls’ school across the river to sell tickets for the play we were rehearsing. We got there during their break time and were cast into a sea of the opposite sex. Imagine being the only two boys bobbing on a tide of curious girls. We got to know some of them. There were two in the production, Polly Morgan and Natasha Pollard. I should probably write more about my adventures with Alan. I can’t move on without mentioning something phenomenal about him – he is unable to wear any kind of watch, electronic or clockwork, without its machinery going permanently haywire – because of his talismanic energy. Also he also once cured my mother’s migraine by flashing her his charismatic smile.

I was Alan’s discovery. He put me forward to the director of The Taming of the Shrew, English teacher Mr Robson, to whom he seemed to relate as an equal, rather than as teacher-student. This would be because they were part of the ‘family,’ you see. They were connected through the theatrical network beyond the petty confines of school. Alan offered me access to this family. It was a nice feeling. I was among people for the first time for whom being a show off wasn’t regarded as a social disease, as is the usual attitude in England.

Barney Watts

Another inimitable character that stood out was Barney Watts. Barney was from the local area, Barnes. He was named thus as he was bread to be a spirit animal of the locale. Barney from Barnes. Like Kensington Ken, Richie from Richmond, Bethnal Green Beth or Ernie from ‘erne ‘ill.

Again, I’m mucking about because I know he’ll never read this. Barney and I would also go on to have many adventures throughout the 90s – until we got married. I mean we each married a woman. I mean two different women. Moving on.

Barney and Alan in the St Pauls playing field. Not playing sport. Photo by Sam Broadbent.

Getting to Know Tim Curtis

There was among the boys there at St Pauls, somebody who cut a very different figure. Tall, with long dark hair, piercing dark eyes, and a certain grace about the way he walked and carried his arms, tugging the sleeves of his jumper over his hands. I was intrigued to know more about this Byronic seeming person. I suppose we bumped into each other a few times and realised we had a lot in common – music and humour, and most of all the view that the self-important majority at the school were ridiculous. And we became good friends.

Tim emerging from the abyss.

Here he is looking mysteriously through one of the poorly constructed ‘carrels’ at school. These were desks based on a medieval design that were supposed to allow us ‘an individual environment for distraction-free learning.’ This definition is from the internet. As you see the partition in the above example had come away meaning the environment there was anything but distraction free.

Tim and I got the same bus home, either the 207 or the 266. So we’d travel part of the way back together through Hammersmith to Acton and Ealing. Buses and standing in the rain waiting for buses became a staple for our song lyrics later on. There was a shop along the way home on Askew Road that had wonky shelves in its front window. Tim found them funny and always commented in an exaggeratedly jovial way when passed them. The way he liked to joke was to pretend to find something funnier than it actually was. I struggle to explain some of the things we found funny but still laugh to myself when I think of them. Here are some similar wonky shelves I saw this year in Paris.

Wonky Parisian shelves

Music of the Time

Mainstream music at the time of The Chimney Sweeps was the Stock Aitken and Waterman type of stuff. Tim would often talk and joke about Pepsi and Shirlie – who were in that vein – he was saying they were silly but he obviously fancied them. The Chimney Sweeps were a hodge podge of everything that wasn’t popular or commercially successful at the time. When I look back to the 80s, it seems that the difference between commercial and alternative culture was very entrenched. Many people I would mix with would sneer at chart music off as ‘too commercial,’ meaning it was manufactured by different professionals collaborating according to their skills to produce a successful product.

That has never seemed a problem to me if the music is good. I met a lot of people with a puritanical view of music in those days. This formula had worked for centuries. But when the singer songwriter revolution of the sixties came and made it uncool to sing other people’s songs. I did think the Stock Aitken and Waterman stuff was rubbish, though. I was probably influenced by this 80s snobbish thinking because I was also carried along by the trend of dismissing anything commercial. But then on the other side there was the awful indie stuff – which I didn’t like either. Headache inducing. There have never been any bands active in my lifetime that I’ve been crazy about.

There was also a lot of retro stuff being played in adverts for lager and jeans. The lager advert with the man lip-synching Tears of a Clown. There was trend for Vietnam War films at the time which fuelled a bit of a retro revival in the 80s as it used 60’s rock and soul on their soundtracks. The best example for me was from one of the first in its genre, Apocalypse Now, when they play The Doors’ The End. I was well up for the Jim Morrison trip of breaking on through to another side of reality. Well, the getting out of your head bit.

I was mainly into acoustic guitar though, so I didn’t like the heavy production and boomy drums. I liked Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie. Also non acoustic stuff like The Rolling Stones country rock stuff, John Lee Hooker, The Monkees (especially their Head album), and Prince. There started to be a little bit of a trend for rootsy acoustic based music around this time with Tanita Tikarum and The Proclaimers. I liked both of them. But it never took off as a trend like it has done this side of the millennium. I was born out of time. Like Prince Hamlet.

Me staring out of the bay window of our house into the bleak 80s suburban wasteland of East Acton.

Tim was a proper music fan. He was well into the indie music scene. He was an avid listener of the John Peel radio programme. Some of his favourites from this milieu I recall being Half Man Half Biscuit, Bog Shed, and The Wedding Present. It was difficult for me to get into this. A big figure for him was Julian Cope who we went to see at The Dominion Tottenham Court Road. Where our musical tastes definitely did unite was on the 60s garage punk that he introduced me to from the Nuggets compilations – think Liar Liar by the Castaways, Matrimonial Fears by The Cymbaline.

10th October 1987. The birth of the Chimney Sweeps

One day at school we had the afternoon off and I invited Tim back to my house. I suppose he had nothing better to do than homework so he said yes. The walk back to my house along Perryn Road to where I lived is about half a mile. It’s lined with semi-detached houses and lime trees. About halfway down Tim plucked leaf from one of the trees, stuffed it into his mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it. I was lost for words. It was most surreal thing I’d ever seen him do, or maybe anyone do. I believe this was the moment, this was a magic spell that allowed us to a place in space and time where we able to reach beyond the greasy miasma of our suburban reality and find access to the primary crystalline clarity of creativity and expression.

Once in the door of the house, Tim picked up my rubbish Spanish acoustic guitar and began to strum, and I began to sing. This was the quickening, the inchoate birth cry of The Chimney Sweeps.

That afternoon we wrote about three songs on our first attempt. The first of these was to become the all-time favourite amongst our friends, Cosmic Garage. This song is about fantastical modes of transport, and travelling around in a happy state of mind. The garage is the place where the fleet of vehicles is stored, and cosmic describes their other-worldly quality. Cosmic was the favourite word of Rodney Trotter from the TV comedy Only Fools and Horses – from the time when it was still funny.

I think Tim plays the G, C, G, Em chord shapes in Cosmic Garage with the guitar tuned down a semi-tone to make the strings nice and loose (it’s in F#). This helped him to get extra bend on the strings, which he liked to do a lot. The bender! 😉

I know this date was 10th October 1987 because I obsessively spoke the date at the beginning of every recording. We wrote about 3 or 4 songs, all in this afternoon, of varying quality. It was indeed an auspicious time, for five days later the UK was to be visited with a once-in-a-generation meteorological storm that reshaped Britain’s natural and cultural landscape.

This first music session with Tim was one of my first attempts at songwriting. We both had the ability to make up tunes and Tim was accomplished at guitar so we discovered that we could produce original songs.

After we had got up and running as a songwriting duo, one day when travelling on the 207 I told Tim about an idea for the name of our band, ‘The Chimneys.’ I felt that this name would conjure the mental image of dark, forbidding urban industrial structures that reflected the alienation of inner city kids in Thatcher’s Britain. Tim agreed on the condition it became The Chimney ‘Sweeps’ – because he was thinking more along the lines of two cheeky Dick Van Dykes in Mary Poppins. I accepted. It was a compromise.

The recordings and how we wrote

Our writing process took on momentum after the promising start that yielded Cosmic Garage. In my bedroom Tim would plop down on the old green pouffe, I would sit on an old children’s school chair line up a tape on the Panasonic tape recorder and we’d start songwriting.

The pouffe was just like this but soiled and deflated.

In the warm weather when I had the window open the recordings would pick up the sound of the trains passing on the North London line, as it was called then. That wasn’t a perfect name for the rail line as it runs for the first third of the way through West London, where we were. When the window was closed, you’d just get the rumble of the whole house shaking as the heavy cement trains went past. If we timed a song right the noise would provide a dramatic back drop.

I would listen to Tim’s playing. Sometimes he’d just have a short riff idea but often he would have a whole sequence worked out. I’d look for interesting sploshes of vocal that complemented it, and then think of some words that I could hang on some thoughts going around my head. Then I’d set them out on some lined A4 paper, like a piece of school work. This system worked for me. I need to see how lyrics look in blocks of text before I can make sense of them and memorise them.

I varied between strict British pronunciation and an exaggerated American accent – influenced by Mick Jagger’s early idea of a Mississippi Delta twang. Listening to my singing now in 2024 I wonder if my voice has changed over 40 years. A man’s voice must react to all that life. But it’s still pretty high range and I’ve been singing pretty consistently. It’s hard to compare because who knows if the recording and playing speed of the tape is accurate – then there’s the fact we compiled the songs taping from one to another. And we didn’t have electric tuners. Only the harmonicas would have kept us in regular pitch.

I decided to buy a harmonica early on. I was listening to a lot of early Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan so that seemed like the thing to do. It was easy to pick up – blow, suck, move it left and right. Bob’s your uncle. The Chimney Sweeps became a multi-instrument concern. I remember purchasing the first one, a diatonic Hohner blues harmonica in A from the music shop in Bond Street, Ealing then waiting for Tim on the grimy concrete wall that used to be outside Ealing Broadway station. The harmonica gave us the scope to play extended instrumental sections. My solos managed to be both chaotic and samey. I was taking my lead from Dylan and Jagger. I wonder if the listeners’ hearts sank when they heard the harmonica start up. But I say it’s a Chimney Sweeps speciality – you’re getting a harmonica solo.

I was also bringing to the table a bit of harmony singing – when Tim sang a rare lead vocal – and some ill-judged bongoing. My thinking there was that the bongo is an impressionistic instrument which one uses to add smatterings of thuds for dramatic purposes, regardless of the pulse of the song.

Last in my sonic arsenal was the Hohner melodica which I borrowed from Tim’s sister Vanessa 40 years ago and still haven’t given back. Well, I haven’t finished borrowing it yet, in fairness. I had to tread a bit more carefully with this as it was capable of producing an unwelcome hoot.

I’ll let you know when I’ve finished with it, Vanessa.

The reason we were able to write songs from the start was because Tim had mastered the guitar by that age, 17. And he had a style and could put together original guitar parts for complete songs. I would just need to add my vocal bit. Sometimes he would find the key for whatever harmonica I was using and come up with something for it.

The Chimney Sweeps’ Beat – a slow, laid back boompa doompa, boompa doompa – was Tim’s style and it was driven by his natural guitarist’s hands. My brother told a drummer playing with us once to do the rhythm to Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears to recreate the same beat. Tim threw into this rhythm the regular ornamentation of bending strings and adding melodic colours with his strong little finger. He liked to draw the songs out – often when I thought we were about to get to the finish he would take another melodic detour and I’d have to do another harmonica bit, willing him to end it. He never troubled me with questions of keys, bars or beats. I was fairly oblivious to all of that. I just did whatever vocals that seemed to fit and he took care of the musical side of things. We didn’t worry about making mistakes on our recordings. Maybe we re-recorded one if I missed a beat but not always. I don’t think I had a great sense then when that happened. It would have felt to me that there had been a slight wrinkle in time, like a strange noise that makes you look up for a second and then give up wondering.

Though my singing is always cheerful and pleasant, I did like to go on about the things in life I found difficult. Tim, for his part, when he was singing or adding backing, would also be a bit philosophical but always relentlessly comedic. I can see now that we were partly a comedy double act. I would try to sing about society and the human condition, and Tim would intersperse my musings with a kazoo solo.

Rock on

The Panasonic Radio Cassette Player was really like the third Chimney Sweep. It had a multitude of functions. As well as playing tapes it could record onto them with a built in microphone hidden somewhere on its body, I never found out where. As you pressed record and play, or stop, or pause at the beginning or end of a song there would be a little side effect – it would add a variety of brief noises to the recording. This would come out as a kind of knocking clunk sound, as if a little gnome had arrived home to his doll’s house and was fumbling to shut his flimsy little plastic front door.

Fumble-Clunk

We were always searching for new sounds and ways to push the boundaries of our medium. I was influenced by The Beatles’ White Album. But there was a limit to what we could achieve with an acoustic guitar, human voice and some basic reed instruments. One experimental speciality of ours was the ‘wig-out’ section. This would be an erratic bit of music of indeterminate length and pitch – usually deployed to solve the problem of how we would end a song. Any structural hurdles we came across while putting together a song would be solved this way. If we came across a bit that we didn’t know how to finish we’d look at each other and have the same thought, “Wig out?’ Yep. We would imagine what it was like to be under the influence of LSD. I would sing and play as if I was being buffeted by a psychedelic maelstrom, crashing atonally hither and thither. Tim would probe the extremities of the musical oceans and skies, searching heroically ever further in semi-tones. Then, after a good while, it would finish and the little gnome would arrive home again. Fumble-clunk.

There was one improvised instrumental track – Joe le Taxidermist. Tim played it to his dad and he gave us the ultimate compliment. He said, ‘You actually sound like you know what you’re doing on that one.’ Listening back now I think this may have been generous.

When the writing and recording sessions finished our mums would make tea – fried potato and bacon at mine, or something topped off with a little bunch of grapes if we were at Tim’s.

Timeline and background

In the years Tim and I hung out, 1986-1989, England was governed by Margaret Thatcher. She won her third term in 1987 and it looked like this horrible woman was going to be a malign influence on our lives forever. The news showed a lot of social strife alongside people making large fortunes. Sensitive young people would lie awake worrying about nuclear war. The fictional teenager Adrian Mole became hugely popular and everyone seemed to think he was hilarious – except me. Because I was feeling and thinking all the same things as him. I felt like someone was reading my thoughts and lampooning me in public.

Random selection of cultural events that stick in my mind:

Where the Wind Blow – animated film about nuclear war – 1986

Sign o’ the Times – Prince double album – 1987

The Great Storm of 1987 – 15–16 October 1987

Stop – single by Sam Brown – May 1988

Hey Music Lover – trippy single by S’Express – February 1989

Ride on Time – single by Black Box – July 1989

These aren’t my selected cultural highlights of the time. They’re things that make me remember how I felt then. I think the way the human body and mind develops in late teenage years makes things we experience seem more significant than they really are.

A couple of typical Chimney Sweeps songs that capture the atmosphere of the times:

Catarrh Song:

We don’t have a barrel of laughs my friend. [not technically true]

We don’t have lots to do.

I don’t have a video cassette player but I do have my guitar.

The sun is shining in Africa. In Acton there is rain.

It was true. My house lacked the otherwise ubiquitous gadget of home entertainment, the home video player recorder. But I did have my guitar, which I didn’t know how to play. But Tim did.

Bus Stop Garden Blues.

Waiting at the bus station – maximum aggravation.

I had to wait an hour then three came along.

But who cares anyway.

This excerpt contains a couple of the main elements of a Chimney Sweeps lyric. It’s only missing the rain. Tim and I would wait for buses in Acton, Ealing and Hammersmith. Occasionally one would come along. Thatcher cut funding to London Transport in the 80s and you would regularly have to wait half an hour or 45 minutes for your bus. So our songs reflected our experience: waiting for buses that never come with an attitude of insouciance. Despite the dreary background we continued to find everything funny. Just as well.

Hi-jinks/Things that seemed funny at the time

What was so funny? What made some wonky shelves in a shop window in Askew Road worthy of attention? Why am I still talking about them? Is anything that’s even slightly out of the ordinary suitable fodder for two young humour maniacs? It would seem so.

Ladbroke Grove jump start. I look back at this incident and laugh. But I struggle to explain to myself why I found it funny then and still do. Tim passed his driving test around this time, just at the earliest age you’re allowed, I think. So we did a few motoring forays to interesting places. It was exciting and liberating and slightly terrifying as well. He had a nice car but it was old and had something wrong with it. Neither of us being mechanics, when it overheated the first time we were out in it, the idea we settled on to fix it was to put ice cubes on the bonnet and wait a while. To give us our due, after about 45 minutes it started again and got us home. The next time we dared to go out in it we decided to go to the Ladbroke Grove area and check out Portobello Road. This part of London has always had an urban fashionableness about it and it was just down the road from where I lived in East Acton (the polar opposite of urban fashionableness at the time) so we drove on down there to soak up some of the vibes and maybe have a legendary experience on a par with the lives of the great rock ‘n’ roll Bohemians who helped to make the area famous. Well, we weren’t to be disappointed.

After having walked around for a bit we returned to the car which was parked in Cornwall Crescent. In we got and Tim started the engine. All of this was new to us. It was hard to believe the freedom that had opened up to us. It felt good but a little scary as well. Suddenly we were surprised by a man standing right next to the car window holding alligator clamps in each of his hands. He asked Tim in quite a friendly way, ‘Is it alright if I get a jump start off you, mate?’ I realise now that he wanted to connect his jump start leads to our battery as his had gone flat. But we were alarmed and had no idea what this would involve. Was it a good thing or a bad thing, we wondered. Being slightly intimidated we agreed. So off he went along to his car, and I guess he expected us to drive alongside and stop. But we looked at each other and asked, ‘What is a jump start?’ As neither of us knew, a new thought occurred to us. Let’s do one! So we bolted. As we drove passed him he watched us go and we saw his expression change from one of hope to one of horror with his mouth wide open, still holding his alligator clamps. That is the climax of this vignette – don’t ask for a refund. I don’t know why we thought it was so funny, and why I still do.

Kings Cross Regents Canal. There was a sitcom at the time called The River where singer and actor David Essex portrayed a charming Cockney ex-convict lock keeper on a canal. Tim seemed to watch it religiously and then sound off to me about the writer’s over-reliance on the dramatic plot device of somebody falling into the canal at some point in every episode. How ironic then was this next chapter in the Chimney Sweeps history! His criticism was to be manifested with – you guessed it – a canal and somebody falling in – him. My brother’s band were performing in the old building in the Camley Street nature reserve in Kings Cross and we went along to watch them. We got there early so decided to wander around and check out the nearby Regents Canal. Walking down the towpath there we saw a little rowing boat tied up to a mooring. Being young and stupid, and looking for thrills, we thought it might be a good idea to climb into this thing and just sit in it for a while, bobbing around on the water and maybe getting inspiration for a concept album. It turns out there’s quite a science to getting in and getting out of a boat. We found this out almost immediately. Holding onto the side we both got a foot onto the boat, whereupon it was pushed away and down. It was not going to allow itself to be boarded and we had seconds to react. I used what little counterforce the boat offered to spring like a cat back onto the path. I think I might have got a wet foot. Tim fared less well, alas. Which was probably not helped by my pushing the boat even further away in my escape. I mean, it was every man for himself. When I looked around, the boat was still happily floating there but Tim was waist deep in the water holding onto the side. I can’t remember what his expression was like but I can imagine. He wasn’t cross for long though. Soon it was time for the music to start. So back we went and joined in the boogeying with the rest of the audience. I don’t think anyone noticed that we were partially drenched, and neither of us cared after a while. Somebody took a video. So it’s possible now to see the Chimney Sweeps happily dancing, Tim soaked from the waist down, me with a wet shoe and sock, squelching away.

Nod’s Corner. Though we both rejected mainstream pop at this time, Tim was at least into contemporary alternative music which he followed on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show in the evening. I only listened to music from the 50s and 60s which I realised was a bit limiting so I copied his habit of buying the weekly music paper Melody Maker to try to broaden my outlook. I did my best to like Indie, Alternative Rock, Shoegaze and Gothic Rock. Life would have been easier for me if I did. In the huge WH Smith shop in Ealing Broadway there was a long gallery of shelves that contained magazines and newspapers specialising in every area of human interest. It was called the browser bar. If you looked along this section of the shop, you could see people who had found their niche huddling around their dedicated section. Gardeners, computer nerds, knitters, and of course fans of alternative music. It was a niche waiting for me to embrace. I could have gone to the concerts, clubs – met new friends. But no, I just could not abide what was to me the offensive sound of their music. One day at the browser bar a steam engine enthusiast stopped Tim and pointed to an article in his train magazine. He said, ‘Can you beat that?’ He must have needed to share his enthusiasm with somebody. Whatever it was I’m sure Tim just humoured him and quickly excused himself. Wrong customer, mate. I persevered with Melody Maker for a long time. Occasionally they’d mention REM who I did like and then eventually Madchester happened and things got more interesting. Until then the thing I most enjoyed was the spoof diary of Alexander ‘Nod’ Wright, drummer for Fields of the Nephilim. I remember this section being called Nod’s Corner but it seems it was called The Nod Corner [I’m getting some important stuff clarified here]. The Fields of the Nephilim seemed to take themselves very seriously. They were gothic rock and were fully invested in their image. They wore weatherbeaten leather Stetsons and overcoats. The ominous, brooding lead singer Carl McCoy’s vocals were like gravel in motion. In The Nod Corner, however, band life was portrayed in a much more upbeat, cartoonish way. Nod was made out to be a well-meaning idiot and Carl the mean guy that took himself too seriously. So it was humour and parody that I found most exciting in this small section of Melody Maker, and after a while I realised that I wasn’t interested in this music scene. So I relinquished my space at the browser bar and wandered off in search of a new spiritual home.

Community Service. When I started at St Pauls I was asked if I had any interest in sport. No. This was a hard no from me. A thing that had to be resisted. The whole thing was alien to me. No one in my family was interested in sport. There was no role model in shorts and trainers to emulate. I think it may be ancestral. If you throw a ball in the presence of a sporty boy he will chase it down and attempt to win it. Not us. I made an effort with my nephew long ago. I chucked a football a few feet from us in the park once. He looked at it. Looked back at me. And that was it. He was happy to leave it where it was. ‘I get you,’ I thought. Let’s go back inside and watch TV. So to avoid sport at school I took the option of doing community service. I was happy to do it. I think there were only two of us in the whole place who were part of the scheme. Me and another boy called Sid. The altruist gene set you apart as a misfit in St Pauls.

The scheme was administered by the formidable Miss Ball who regarded me as a scourge. She had a very strong work ethic, so naturally we clashed. She first sent me to a centre for the blind in Barons Court, which doesn’t seem to exist now. It was a nice place. A big Georgian house frequented mainly by old people. They had a piano. Then there was the Grove Neighbourhood Centre in the heart of Hammersmith. This was run by two very nice women who put me to work with old people that needed a bit of gardening or other jobs doing. Mostly they wanted company. The ladies from the community centre – I wish I could remember their names – prepared me for what I would have to deal with when helping old people. There was the woman with advanced dementia, that was a shock. The first thing they taught me was to be firm about accepting or turning down the offer of tea. Accepting a cup would mean committing at least 45 minutes of your time. I had nowhere to rush off to.

After doing community service for a while, and then striking up my friendship with Tim, I persuaded him to come along with me. He had been quite handy on the courts and pitches of school, I believe. So abandoning this must have been quite a loss for the sporting tribe. We had some interesting visits. We went along together to visit an elderly gentleman who lived in the ground floor flat of a house round there. He had a greyhound dog and his flat was pretty squalid. The dog had done its business all over the place. It was a minefield. We were a bit wary of drinking tea out of his mugs. He told us he’d been a producer on A Hard Day’s Night. We were sceptical until he showed us a black and white photo of The Beatles signed by all four of them. Then there was the old man we had to take to the chemist in King Street in his wheelchair. What a caper that was! He said he wanted ‘Gentian violet for tinea.’ We kept saying ‘What? Pardon?’ and he’d repeat himself. He might as well have been speaking ancient Greek. It wasn’t until he spoke to the pharmacist, and she explained, that we realised the poor geezer just had athlete’s foot. The people there that we loved the most – hence I remember their names – were Nellie and Len Kendrick. I think they were on Carthew Road. They were an old local couple who were just lovely. They were very interested in us and they told us all about their family. I think we used to play up and make them laugh a lot. We might have brought the guitar and done a little bit of Chimney Sweeps magic for them. Nellie’s speciality was making instant coffee with just hot milk – no water. I thought it was delicious and she was delighted to tell me her secret recipe. They had a big record collection and I used to beg Nellie to let me get them out and play them but she always said no, but with a look of regret. She just couldn’t stand the upheaval. They were just an ordinary couple but Len was very cultured. He used to read the complete works of Shakespeare over and over. When I was in The Taming of the Shrew, I invited them to watch, and one of the nice ladies from the community centre brought them along. They were so old and frail I don’t think they ever went out the house normally. It was great seeing them there and they looked really happy.

DDN END. The Dead End Kids

On A-level results day I went back to the school to see what I’d got. The way you found out then was to read a notice on the wall in the corridor. You could see what everyone else got too, if you were nosey. Confidentiality hadn’t been discovered back then. I got DDN. And another friend got END. I consoled myself with a joke, saying we were the Dead End Kids.

School photo

But it wasn’t far from the truth. Academically, the whole two years had been a waste of time and money. It’s shocking to think that me and all my friends there, except for Barney, did so dreadfully at A-levels. Maybe it was my influence! It’s strange to think though that we weren’t more upset about this result. I don’t remember any of us being particularly unhappy at any point that summer. I was probably expecting to get poor results, and the teachers would probably say it was all my own fault.

So in 1988 me and Tim went to spend the next year re-taking our A-levels at the same place, Collingham Tutors in Kensington and Chelsea. I copied Tim as I had no other plan. I thought we’d be together throughout this but we were in totally different classes. I made some new friends though. It was an interesting section of people – elite dropouts and people that just wanted to fast track their education and avoid normal school. My life was again characterised by the familiar theme of walking around the streets trying to look like I belonged or that I knew where I was going.

A memorable encounter

For lunch and sometimes breakfast I used to wander down to a place on Bute Street. I think it was street numbers 20-22 – a double fronted place with booths going all around. It was a London style ‘caff’ that was run by Italians. So you could get full English type breakfasts as well as spaghetti bolognaise. All at caff prices. I’d be amazed if you could find any such place now. I remember a lovely old couple that ran the place. She told me off once for cutting up the spaghetti into short lengths. I used to do this for ease of shovelling. I’ve stopped doing this now as it seems to cause offence to the Italian people.

One lunchtime the lady in charge was going around telling everyone, ‘We have a monkey… There is a monkey here.’ When she got to my table I asked her what she was talking about. I realised she was saying that someone from the band, The Monkees, was sitting around the corner. They were in town playing the Albert Hall, which was nearby. The show was on 25th March 1989. When I heard there was one of my musical heroes in the same building, I sensed then that this was an opportunity for something – I didn’t know what exactly. Excitement, a brush with fame, embarrassment, anticlimax? All of these possibilities went through my head. I could carry on eating or I could make something interesting happen. I found myself standing up and walking around the booths, scanning the faces of the customers, looking for Davy, Mike, Mickey or … Peter! There was Peter Tork – a fair bit older than he was in the TV series – sitting alone, eating two fried eggs. Loveable and innocent. Just like his character on the TV series. Why not just sit down in front of him while he’s eating! Well, that was my thinking. And I did it. What did I say? I think I just reeled off a load of praise for what the TV programme meant to me. The Monkees had a magical atmosphere. Even now as a grown up I can remember the feeling when the Sunday cultural wasteland of 70s UK was brightened for a fleeting half an hour when the TV scheduling gods threw us a little treat and showed an episode The Monkees. They were four goofy friends in 60s California doing funny sketches, playing cool music, having fun, driving along beside the ocean in the warm sunny breeze and smiling. It was like finding magical fairy creatures at the end of your garden. Only for 30 minutes though. Then it was back to sport, politics, hymns and dreary soaps. I also raved to him about their music. I had The Monkees greatest hits album and the soundtrack to their later film Head, and I was playing them both all the time. I am a real fan. But I’m not sure if that justifies me interrupting his meal. I said to him Head was my favourite. He replied – just one of the two statements he made that I remember – ‘It’s mine too.’ And he smiled. Mentioning Head was probably quite a good move. The album had come out over twenty years ago then, but it had two of his songs on it. When you hear the story of the band, they always seemed to be battling for more self-expression. So, it may have been a long time ago, but the Head album would have been something he was proud of above most of their output that people would commonly associate him with. And it made him smile. I was probably only in front of him for two minutes – I’ve really milked this encounter. Hopefully his food didn’t go cold. But he was just as nice as he seemed on TV. After I’d said this, what else was there to do or say? We couldn’t do selfies then. We just had plain old autographs. I pulled out a notepad and pen and said, could you sign an autograph … for the Chimney Sweeps? He smiled and looked at me. ‘Is that a rock band?’ There was a connection. Somewhere on an imaginary plain we were jamming together. Yeah! Music! We were troubadour brothers bringing magic music out of heaven. ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ Then off I went to tell my tale to all my friends. ‘Sit down. You’re never gonna believe who I met. Look at this!’ Those that didn’t share my excitement weren’t really friends. I hope I still have that bit of paper somewhere. God bless you, Peter!

Peter Tork

Foster and Allen

Foster and Allen are a couple of Irish fellas who have been playing folky traditional music since I was knee high to a leprechaun. The thing that connects them to the Chimney Sweeps mythology is The Rocket pub in Churchfield Road, Acton. Tim and I would regularly pop in there during the time of the Chimney Sweeps. I was at the legal drinking age for some of that time. I was never asked for proof. It’s changed a lot since those days. When we used to go there it looked like it hadn’t been touched since the 1870s. Which suited us. There was a main saloon bar on the south side, a lounge bar in the middle with a pool table, and a small snug at the north end. That was a great place to have a few drinks and talk bollocks for a couple of hours. We developed our own terminology. I remember a couple of the phrases. One was lifted from the character Dirty Den in the TV soap Eastenders. He was a well-known, rough and ready character in the soap that was really watchable in those days. This fact might be of doubtful origin, but as I remember Den was dishing out a bit of cockney attitude to somebody in an episode, and he shouted out, ‘Oi! Shut it, gooner!’ We took this up and ran with it. Everyone became ‘gooner.’ It became a friendly greeting. ‘Alright gooner!’ I know this word is supposed to refer to someone who supports Arsenal football team, but that doesn’t fit with my memory of how Dirty Den used the term, and I’m not going to trawl through a couple of years’ worth of EastEnders videos to get to the bottom of it, gooner!

Dirty Den from EastEnders from when it was worth watching.

The other term we used was ‘funeral face.’ I have even less recall about the evolution or usage of this one, but it was definitely a well-loved Chimney Sweeps totem.

So what about Foster and Allen! Well as I was saying, The Rocket was a bit of a relic of times gone by. In those days signs of the Irish influence on London were still conspicuous in many pubs and cafes, and on the jukebox in The Rocket then you would find that almost half the records were by Foster and Allen. It might have been the end of the era, but you would still get one or two old geezers in there enjoying a relaxing pint, gently dreaming about the old country to the strains of sweet sentimental songs. I didn’t mind the songs at all – my uncle used to sing Bunch of Thyme, which is a lovely song. We got to know an old Irish gent in there who told me that he met his wife in the IRA. This was a bit shocking then because this name brought to mind a violent ongoing struggle, the wrong end of which I might have been perceived to be on (notwithstanding my great uncle was JB Keane). But this friendly old guy insisted that when he was part of the IRA there wasn’t all that bad feeling. It wasn’t all about bombs and that. He made it out to be more of a community social organisation. I suppose it was a long time ago.

Me and Tim were very much at ease at The Rocket in those days. But what if we were transplanted there to the present day; what would we have made of the gastro food, the book and the film club? I like to think we’d have had a lot more fodder for taking the piss.

But going back to those days again, Tim was walking to my house early one morning, cutting through Acton Park and carrying his guitar. There were a couple of old Irish guys sitting on a bench there, debating something probably. He told me about this when he got to my house. When they saw he was carrying a guitar they were prompted to comment make a big fuss. This does happen if you pass people sometimes when you’re carrying a guitar. But the sight of the guitar genuinely delighted them and they called out to Tim to join them and play a few songs. With happy faces they called out, ‘Come and sit down and play. What do you know? What songs do you know?’ Tim didn’t intend to stick around, but he wouldn’t pass by without giving an answer. So he called back speculatively, ‘err .. Foster and Allen?’ The mention of these names had an effect like a magical charm. For these two guys on the bench it raised the level of emotion to an apex. For a second they were silent. Tim saying that was as good as anything else he could have said or done. When one of them was able to gather his thoughts, he simply replied to Tim in the sincerest way, ‘God bless you for saying Foster and Allen.’ And Tim went on his way leaving two very satisfied customers.

The Chimney Sweeps Beyond!

We made an effort to get our music out into the world and show it off. We made a tape of an album of the best songs and distributed it among our friends. I made a cover for it with a design of a forest of purple trees.

At school we had a small music class and played a couple of songs for everyone there. The reaction was general bewilderment. I accept that not everyone shares the same taste and you can love or hate music or any form of expression. Some people, though, feel the need to stifle other people who dare to put themselves out there. The teacher’s only comment was that Tim had tuned his guitar nicely.

Our desire to move things to another level inspired us to look for other members so that we could feel like a proper band. All the bands in Melody Maker had a drummer and bass player so we felt slightly bare with just the two of us. But really neither of these were necessary for the kind of music we’d written, certainly not aggressive rock backing. Our friend Rohan Whalley said he was interested in playing drums. This made him number one in the queue for the trials as our drummer – there wasn’t a number two. He didn’t actually have any drums at the time, or sticks. But I had those so we let him loose with them on anything we could find for him to hit. Regrettably I gave him my mum’s favourite biscuit tin for the purpose. I look at the dents on it to this day and remember my mistake.

We played a couple of times at friends’ parties – once for a joint birthday celebration for me Geraldine and Jane in County Grove, and Carla Trott’s in Gladstone Road.Chris Modicaplayed some brilliant drums with brushes for us at the Bonnington Square Cafe, which was a squatted shop. We busked around London two or three times until Tim’s fingers turned to bloody stumps and my mouth became like raw bacon from hours of harmonica playing. We tried Portobello Road, Embankment and Hungerford Bridge. I don’t think we recouped the cost of the day travelcards. Then we went to Amsterdam and busked there. This got us our largest payment when we posed for photos with some Moroccan sex tourists. We also played a couple of songs at a folk venue with an open mike spot. That was a really good crowd.

He doesn’t wear a trench coat on his back – moving on

In the summer of 1989, we’d retaken our A-levels and got good enough results to get accepted into higher education. Tim did well and was heading to Birmingham University to do philosophy. I scraped in by the seat of my pants to Portsmouth Polytechnic to do Literary Studies and French.

This was the end of the road for the Chimney Sweeps. The final adventure we had together was a summer job at the Kensington Hilton. For a few weeks we worked in the laundry in the basement there. The job involved standing by a folding machine that spat out clean partially folded sheets. You had to catch them, fold them again a couple of times, and then stack them. I often think about people down there when I pass by the hotel. The pay was so insignificant. I remember getting paid one week and wandering back to Acton through Shepherd’s Bush market. I think I bought a carton of Ribena and a pair of new trousers and then had almost nothing left in the pay packet. It wasn’t the greatest adventure we had.

I think the songwriting partnership had reached the end of its life. I had started trying to play the guitar and brought a couple of song ideas to Tim. My playing was much rougher than his so it didn’t sound anything like what we had done before. Also, Tim had come up with the backing for a complete song. Something he’d done throughout our partnership. Up to then I would have quickly thought up a tune and words to add to it. But this time I was really struggling. After a frustrating session I got him to record it so I could try to find something when he’d gone. But nothing was coming. He was annoyed.

So, with no official ceremony, no fireworks – the Chimney Sweeps were over.

Indoor firework snake to belatedly mark the end of the Chimney Sweeps

It was hard to let go of. He went on to have another musical collaboration which made me a bit cross. ‘I bet his new musical partner is an idiot,’ I’d think jealously. Add to that his new stuff was significantly beyond the Chimney Sweeps in musical terms.

I wonder if I’d have done any better academically if I’d gone somewhere different to St Pauls. The standard of learning there is probably among the best and I was out of my depth. But despite my refusal to study or to allow uninteresting knowledge to infiltrate my brain, it’s possible I’d have done just as poorly if I’d gone any other school. So I may as well have been exposed to some quality learning if at all. And I did make a handful of really good friends there – people who were really good for me to know. 

My lyrics for our song Jimmy the Sin are about the people I knew with subtlety and inconspicuous intelligence. People who contrasted with the arrogant and dull sons of the rich who I had to suffer at school. When I wrote the lyric ‘He doesn’t wear a trench coat on his back,’ I was thinking of Tim. Trench coats then were a staple of middle class alternative youth fashion in the 80s – I had a couple myself. You had to go to Flip on Kings Road to get yourself issued with one. They were a simple way of capturing a tangible representation of the aura of alternativeness. We were like an army of Lieutenant Columbos. As a trench coat refusenik, Tim marked himself beyond this social sub-category. Being alternative was a way of life for him. His cathedrals were Viz, Bog Shed, and pretzels. Writing this lyric I was showing my appreciation. I was depressed, anxious and alienated, then I discovered music, creativity, and friendship.

Critical Anal-ysis

Did we ever have a chance to make it? Would a producer or manager have given us the impetus to get a record deal? How it could have been encapsulated – what would a producer have done for us, or a manager. I had a good friend at the time called Matthew Kettle who is now a freelance sound engineer. He was a Canadian/British guy who was at Pimlico School. He was someone who really knew what he was talking about when it came to music, from a very early age. He worked in an electrical shop while studying music technology at college, which really impressed me as it initiated him onto the ways of the world. His colleagues seemed to be stealing most of the stock. He was a massive fan of Sonic Youth – not my cup of tea. He went on to study production at college and he got us in to do a demo in his college studio – we were joined by a drummer from the student funk band, Serve Chilled. He must have had some appreciation for our music. I remember his take was that roughness was our charm and thought it would be hard to see how polishing it would be an improvement. We were uncool, cheeky, and loveable.

So is the music any good? Have I been rambling on at length for a good reason? I’ve listened back to the songs, digitised them and uploaded them so that the world can now enjoy them. I’m proud of them. I enjoyed hearing them again – some are going round my head and my son is singing bits to himself from hearing me play them. Maybe this blog will spark a revival? Listen now to (Embryonic Songs of) The Chimney Sweeps Vol. 1.

**

Embryonic Songs of The Chimney Sweeps Vol.1

A

1. Rhythmic Brainstorms – 10th Oct 1987 – 9
2. Death of a Truck Driver – 6
3. Corny Flakes – 9
4. Go Away – 29th Oct 1987 – 9
5. Cosmic Garage – 9
6. Let’s Escape – 30th Oct 1987 – 8
7. Bus Stop Garden Blues – 8
8. Catarrh Song – 21st November 1987 – 7
9. Holocaust Hilda – 28th December 1987 – 7
10. My Sweet Lord – 7
11. Thinking About Life (Instru) – tape jumping issue – 7
12. Party Scene – 8
13. Joe le Taxidermist (Instru) – 7
14. Jimmy the Sin – 9
15. This Pilot Your Mind (Travelling in Time) – 8 (cuts off)

B

1. This Pilot Your Mind (Travelling in Time) – 8
2. Jimmy the Sin (Remix) porta studio – 6
3. No Expectations (Porta studio) – 6
4. Comic Garage (Revamp) (Porta studio) – 6
5. Void – 13th September 1988 – 8
6. Don’t Cool It – 7
7. Love in Vain – 7
8. Drivin’ – 7
9. It’s My Song and I’m Singing It – 6
10. Paper Ladies – 6
11. Maudlin Madelaine – 8
12. Black Ship – 7
13. Ten Drinks Later – 7
14. Icelate – (tape glitch) – 7
15. Diane Leaves – 6

Tim and Rohan

Bill’s Youth Hostel Amsterdam

Cut to 2017. It’s still raining!