HERE GOES
NOTHING
Robb Johnson and The Irregulars — eight songs that nearly never became an album.
Here Goes Nothing was released on 4 May 2015 as a CD, or as a CD and vinyl LP pairing. It was Robb's first record funded through Kickstarter.
TRACK LIST
Eight tracks formed the finished album.
- Here Goes Nothing
- Autumn Song
- North By Northeast
- Yellow House
- The Rose and Crown
- Big Man Waiting For His Train
- The Ghost Dance
- The Magic Tonight
SOME BACKGROUND
Firstly, I think me and The Irregulars are really proud of this album. Ali Gavan, who recorded and mixed most of it, also thought it was something rather special.
That was perhaps more remarkable because it nearly didn't happen at all. The previous autumn, I had all these songs and they seemed to warrant a band recording. The only thing was, I wondered if making a band album wasn't a pointless exercise.
Apart from a few lovely venues, it had always proved difficult to find gigs — and indeed probably any place in contemporary music where the band fitted.
The previous two Irregular albums, Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After, had sold spectacularly badly. I was taking them round the few folk festivals I got booked at in 2013, and you could see people take one look at the covers and almost visibly recoil at the sight of these surly rock'n'roll desperadoes.
The band had also expanded, with Roger on piano and Linze on saxophone, but everybody had their own things to do. Co-ordinating a successful band getting lots of work is not a problem I've ever had, but I bet it's not half as difficult as co-ordinating a band that gets no gigs and makes no money. So — I nearly didn't bother.
It was only because individual Irregulars were so positive that we carried on.
We had a gig booked at The Hope & Anchor. I don't like cancelling gigs anyway, so those of us who felt like giving it a bash did the gig, just to see if there was a chance the band might still be a viable proposition.
Tim was also feeling as I was — that the frustrations were too many — so declined. I was more than a bit concerned that this would mean I'd be the only guitarist. I know of only one way to cope with that, and that is called a Les Paul.
I am not a clever or fast or particularly interesting guitarist, so I need a guitar that, when you hit it, stays hit. So I exhumed the Epiphone Les Paul from the top of the wardrobe in the back boxroom.
I am always grateful when people turn up to gigs, but there should be a particular toast of thanks to the people who came to that gig, because if they hadn't, we very likely wouldn't have carried on.
Despite Arv having to use a drum kit that was close to being a collection of cardboard boxes, the gig — the band — rocked. We found that doing the new songs rather than songs from the previous band albums worked really well for us.
Elated by the racket, we decided to carry on regardless.
I'd had all sorts of titles for the album: Stories and Noise, The Magic Tonight... but having decided that all those negatives hadn't changed at all, and didn't matter at all either, I found myself finding a riff and writing a song called Here Goes Nothing.
That seemed both a good way to kick-start the album and an appropriate title for it too.
THE MAGIC TONIGHT
I always knew that the songs, and therefore the album, would be some sort of continuation of the perspective of 2014's Us and Them, and the key song that expressed this most clearly was The Magic Tonight.
The second verse wanted to make the point that the culture of popular music — the culture of the people, the working class — was being appropriated by the newly confident upper classes.
I wanted an antithesis: someone who knew what rock'n'roll meant, someone who lived it rather than simply trying on and buying into the trappings.
First choice was obviously Joe Strummer, but Joe was also ex-public school, so I then added a long list of names: John Lennon, John Lydon, Bob Marley, Lee Fardon and Grace Petrie. That was a bit difficult to sing.
So I settled for Mick Farren.
Mick didn't go to public school, knew exactly what rock'n'roll meant, never compromised his beliefs, was a genius writer and brilliant frontman, and collapsed on stage and died in 2013.
His book Watch Out Kids blew my tiny little mind when I bought a second-hand copy from an old hippy's junk stall at Sussex University.
I later had the great pleasure of interviewing Mick by email for Rock'n'Reel. The interview coincided with one of the magazine's disappearances before it reinvented itself as R2, so it was never published.
THE MICK FARREN INTERVIEW
The previously unpublished interview was later preserved as part of the archive surrounding Here Goes Nothing.
MAKING THE ALBUM
I decided that I wanted this album to come out on vinyl. That limits the time, but I think it focuses the mind on what tracks really work well together.
I have found in the past that CD albums with more than ten songs often mean songs get lost. There is a difference between anthologies, whose purpose is to collect and record as much as possible or necessary, and an album that is a crafted piece of original work.
So we thought about which songs absolutely needed to be included, and which songs then worked well around them. This meant we had an album of eight tracks.
I didn't think that was a problem. Some of my favourite albums have eight tracks — Born To Run and Lives in the Balance — while White Light/White Heat only has six. The important thing was that the eight tracks formed a cohesive whole.
We had four tracks that didn't fit in. Two of them featured trains, which seemed to conflict with the track about Roy Chuter, Big Man Waiting for His Train, which we all felt deserved a place on the album.
So the two cheerier train tracks, Bella Vita and The Midnight Train, became part of the Kickstarter offers.
The two more knees-uppy tracks, Cheap and Cheerful and The Top of This Wheel, became obvious choices for the Record Store Day single.
Maybe if the album is ever reissued, they should all be included as bonus tracks. But I think the eight tracks we chose work really well together and, despite its difficult start, this is an album I remain really proud of.
TRACK BY TRACK
Here Goes Nothing
“A song with Johnny Ramone and Wayne Kramer in it,” said Django Deadman, the soundman at the Albert, when we soundchecked with this song. “Impressive.”
Good, I thought. I hadn't thought of Johnny Ramone. I like it when my songs do that — get positive responses I hadn't thought of.
This is sort of a song about relationships: the lunacy, delight and possible destructiveness of attraction, whether that's interpersonal and sex or subcultural and guitars.
The people I think are in this song include Johnny Hallyday and Lou Reed's Sweet Jane; Leonard Cohen; Rimbaud and Verlaine; the twin guitars of the MC5, Sonic and Wayne; and finally a particularly combustible imagined Friday-night meeting between Jimmy Osterberg — Iggy Pop — and Germaine Greer.
Autumn Song
I started thinking about the possibility of this song while watching the leaves fall from the trees in the school playground.
One of the few benefits of a lifetime spent teaching the nation's small people is the sharp awareness of just how much potential each one has — and an equally sharp anger at how much of that potential is neglected, wasted and disappointed by self-serving people in positions of power and authority.
North By Northeast
The title comes partly from where the song was written and partly because it sounds good — from Shakespeare and Hamlet via Hitchcock.
I was fortunate enough to get a gig at The Sage in Gateshead. The song is largely a collection of impressions from the night I spent there.
Yellow House
There is a longer backstory about how I got there, but essentially I wrote this version of Vincent van Gogh's life story when I finally got to Arles.
The Yellow House was indeed destroyed by the RAF during the Second World War.
Van Gogh's life story isn't simply a paradigm of the struggling misunderstood artist. It is also a story of how society neglects, wastes and disappoints individual creativity and promise.
And, of course, me and Vince were both supply teachers in what is now the London Borough of Hounslow.
The Rose & Crown
The Irregulars — thanks to my good mate and living legend Graham Larkbey — got a gig at the wonderful Rose & Crown in Walthamstow.
This song is a record of that. Mick is Mick Appleton from the Slough posse, Kate is an old friend from London alternative folk and activist circles, and the new kid is, of course, my son Arv on drums.
Thank God for beer and rock'n'roll.
Big Man Waiting For His Train
This song is a big goodbye hug to an even bigger man.
It is about my friend Roy Chuter — poet, football activist and landlord. You can see him with his dog Kitty on the cover of Us and Them.
Our friendship was first really cemented when Roy took me for a drink around various Brighton pubs, pointing out which ones were music venues. Because I said I really liked The Evening Star, he went and arranged my first gig there.
It was lovely that I eventually got a gig at The Albert, another pub we had visited together, when we launched this album. Roy wasn't there.
The song is about Roy's decision to end his life under a train.
Roy's greatest mate Attila added beautiful, eloquent, elegiac violin to the song.
The Ghost Dance
This song was inspired by Dave Douglass's biographical history of the Miners' Strike, Ghost Dance.
As a song it evolved and kept growing, eventually becoming a sort of recent history of the working class.
It starts with Roger's music-hall piano and ends with Linze's defiant, exuberant and soulful saxophone fighting its way through the post-punk, post-industrial racket.
There is also a literary reference to George Orwell's undefeated proletarian hanging out her washing, alongside Thatcher and Cameron and the histories of class and privilege they represented.
What are we kneeling down for?
The Magic Tonight
I think I've already covered that one.
That's Roy's voice you can hear just before the song starts, from when he was landlord at The Duke of Wellington, Shoreham:
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