The New Wave Years

1979: Playing to our Strengths

Tony Simons, lead guitar 1977-80, recalls:

Around this time, the Greenbelt festivals had been running for some three years; and we used to go along as a group, camping in the fields of Northamptonshire, attending the daytime seminars and of course sitting up late for the concerts on the main stage. We were great fans of a group called After the Fire. They had gone through a progressive rock phase, sounding like Camel; but with the arrival of the New Wave in the late 1970's they suddenly abandoned this and produced a series of rather rough-sounding, short, punchy songs. I didn't like this particularly; but later, they won a contract with CBS and refined the sound, with the addition of a guitarist who played harmony lines opposite the synthesiser. Suddenly, we all realised that this was the exact model for 20th Century to follow. Mark Allchorn knew the After the Fire group members through some local Eastbourne connections and they came to visit him in hospital, which was a real morale-booster. He got out on crutches by the Autumn and we set about re-building the band.

In addition to the regular musicians, some talented members of 20th Century served as technicians and road crew. While Mark carried on building audio equipment, we had also acquired the valuable technical skills of John Roe (subsequently a distinguished Mathematics Professor at Oxford and Pennsylvania State), who built lighting rigs and sound-effects units from all kinds of bits and pieces that we picked up at junk sales. John built a wind-noise generator, with an emergency cut-out for when the oscillator went unstable. John and Mark built footlights using MDF boxes, 150W light-bulbs, coloured gels and baking foil as the reflector. The hardest thing was matching impedances. I remember John having to insert a resistance shunt made from a 2-bar electric fire into a circuit, so that some high-power theatre spotlights could be controlled by the same faders as a standard 150W light-bulb rig. At the start of our concerts, the faders were down and the electric fire came on. The road crew (John Roe and Mike Stone) would roast at the back of the hall, until curtain-up when the spotlights came on and the 2-bar fire could finally cool down!

1980: Stand Up and Be Counted

I fell back into the saddle as lead guitarist, having bought a Gibson Les Paul Custom with money earned during my year abroad. Mark Hammond took over the bass guitar position full time, after Dave Hobson graduated, and he played a fine Fender Precision model. We had a new drummer, Simon Matthews, whom I remember mostly for his skill in milking space invader machines of their money; and for ferrying me at breakneck speeds on the back of his 1000cc motorbike. Mark Allchorn (complete with leather trousers) was the New Wave front man, backed by our up-tempo symphonic rock style. Dermot Boyle joined as second guitar and Graham Gill continued on the keyboard stack, topped by a brand new mini-Moog. (The main keyboard stack had an electric organ, a piano and a mini-Moog; sometimes a second stack of a pianet and a Jen synthesiser was also used).

We decided to record Stand Up and Be Counted, backed by Jon Wicks' song He is the One. We pitched in a hundred quid each and, together, this gave us enough to record and produce the single. We used the Kent studio of another progressive band called The Enid, who gave us a very favourable rate (£12 an hour). They were a cult hippy band, whose albums sounded like classical symphonies, played with rock instruments. They had a kind of large farmhouse and seemed to live communally there, with the studio built in the basement. We spent all of the first day setting up the microphones, recording the live performance guide tracks and laying down the drums. Simon was so exhausted, he kept getting his bass drum and snare beats inverted after the fills, so had to keep on re-recording his track. At 3am, he crashed out on the couch saying, "I do NOT want to be a rock-star".

We woke up to a cooked breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, tomatoes and toast. This was unexpected since The Enid were all vegetarians! On the second day, we laid down the guitar and bass tracks. I wrote a new instrumental line for the chorus of the song and double-tracked this in the final chorus. By mid-morning, Mark, Graham and I finished the lead and backing vocals. We were so exhausted and relieved after completing side A of the single that, somehow, we were more relaxed when recording the B-side. This had more of a bluesy feel, with my guitar work based on damped runs and Dermot pulled off a fantastic blues solo. Graham, Mark and I decided to do an alternative arrangement for verse 3, which sounded really great in the final mix, rather like The Stranglers. The crew from The Enid were really kind to us; at first they thought we might be some upstart punk outfit, but realised as we laid down the complex harmonies that we really could play the instruments. Graham spent the last night working on the mini-Moog solo parts, which gave our band its peculiar blend of Progressive and New Wave styles.

Best Student Band in Cambridge

A thousand copies of Stand Up and Be Counted were pressed and these were all snapped up by our fans in one year, partly through sales at live concerts and partly through Rough Trade, an independent distributor. We played several concerts in and around Cambridge and were voted the best student band in 1980. We were the kings of Prog New Wave, which also became known later as Power Pop. During that year, we heard that Barry Jones had died; and that the cause had eventually been diagnosed as a new type of leukemia. We attended the funeral in Gainsborough on a rather cold and windy day in Spring.

We went on tour that Summer to Kent and Sussex, performing at village halls, schools, clubs and at one prison. I remember the chaplain weeping tears of joy in the interval, saying "Go on, play some more, they're listening to you". We played our entire repertoire. One of the prisoners half-inched the chapel pot-plant as he left. That tour was memorable: we went to Eastbourne, Brighton, Chaley, Ringmer, Bexley Heath and so forth. I remember being mobbed at Brighton and Hove Girls' School. My second-best C20th T-shirt still bears the rip-marks. Those were the days! My final concert with the band was later in the Summer of 1980, back in Great Yarmouth, at the Kerygma Centre. That year, we had managed an amazing 35 gigs between 16th November 1979 (the Selwyn Diamond) and and 12th July 1980 (the Kerygma Centre). And we all got decent degrees when we graduated.

Thanks to Graham Gill, keyboards 1979-81, for some of the above details.

Editor's Note: John Roe passed into glory on 9 March 2018, after a battle with cancer. He leaves behind a treasure trove of wisdom in his blog Points of Inflection.