This is another of the various archival finds from the house great sort out I am currently having assisted by Jim Tetlow.

Jim digitalised the original tape and edited out any false starts and dead space but otherwise here we have what was recorded in my Queens Road flat 32 years ago.

Never intended for public hearing this tape is as far away from 2024 as 1960 was from 1992.

Jim offered to play this edited version back to me. I did ask to hear one title that I had no recollection of and I was taken aback by the sheer feral power of it. I then decided let it come out as a whole unheard and unjudged by modern day me. So it’s a document of who I was then untampered with by who I am now.

13 songs out of these 22 tracks have never appeared before in any form.

61A had been above the Alliance and Leicester building society but by then Morellis had opened their barbershop (though the bicycle attached to the wall was a few years away. Also a while away was the stylish Queens Road area of cafes restaurants and bars as it is now known.)

I sing, accompanied by my Ovation Balladeer acoustic guitar into a Yamaha microphone put through a couple of Boss pedals into my Sony mono cassette recorder.

Some ideas got developed and were rewritten/re-recorded ‘properly’, while others just faded away. I was coming out of 5 years of heaven and hell and rapture and anguish and heavy drinking and I think it shows… but I was soon to leave Clarendon Park - I didn’t know that almost 7 years of major relationship and parenthood was just around the corner though that was ultimately to lead to disaster too.

This is the dawn of the timescale that led to the similarly stark ‘Doomcloud’ at the other end.

Some of these songs fizzled out because as I recall it wasn’t the kind of stuff you sang about with a new girlfriend around. Some of it perhaps doesn’t fit in with today’s outlook either.

I had form for writing, recording and releasing cringeworthily ‘honest’ material - that’s why I all but dismiss my 80s Factory / Cherry Red output.

Maybe somebody will tell me if it’s THAT bad… or I will eventually listen to it one day and plead with Jim to please take it offline ASAP!

Most people just form relationships and live normal lives with no great angst. Their triumphs and tragedies just kind of even out. I am much less a fan of the artist having any exemption these days. As Dylan sang on ‘Dear Landlord’ “I know you’ve suffered much but in this you are not so unique”.

Folks just get on wiv it so none of this may have any relevance to anyone but the idiot who thought he was living through it.

Smokey appears on the cover photo during a revisit to the old place a few weeks ago. You can walk down the entry to the lovely Prettiez shop that’s there now at 61B. I always feel like I still have a key to the flat next door and could walk back in there, back into the 1990s and get it right this time… if there ever is a ‘right’ that is…