In April 2012, we started an Arts Night, none of us knew at the time that was exactly what David Bowie had done a half century earlier in an effort to reboot his music career. We talked and sang and wrote songs, and read poetry and discussed life and death, the universe, theism and atheism, and so much more…
Musicians and poets came and went, but there was a core that aggregated each month in the echoing ex-chapel sing acapella and a capo. Thew conglomerate would perform live, classic material and falsetto white whine songs, self-penned and musing on the aforementioned life, death, universe, godliness, and ungodliness.
Ultimately, a band emerged – C5 the Band – and solo performances, and ad hoc combinations; pubs were played, festivals, and even events performed at, many a G-string was snapped.
One of our number, known locally as Guru Clive-upon-Sea would team up with C5 singer-guitarist Dave Bradley to create the Fragments album, an eclectic mix of singer-songwriter, folk, roots, with a heavy splash of progressive rock and funk, thanks to dB/ and some of the most interesting chord progressions this side of John Cage’s 4’33”.
But, the band and Clive were cleft, perhaps destined to never perform together live again, there were no musical differences [there were], no fallings out, no overblown egos burst. In what some see as an inevitable conclusion, Clive ended up on a special ward…it was, some wag might say, a Psycho meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest moment. The follow-up to Fragments is all in his head, a stormy, windswept occasionally bearded destination, that looks out to sea, but can never reach the horizon.
Meanwhile, le studio lies empty awaiting Clive’s chordal imaginings, his vocal strains. Bradley toils over a hot laptop there bereft at having nothing but his own proggie noodlings to over-blow and over-produce. The band is on corona-driven hiatus, with all gigs cancelled and venues emptied.
Clive meanwhile has taken to posing for septic selfies, skeptical of Bradley’s allusions to Pink Floyd. He grimaces from the ward at the thought of not a single soul in the studio recognising his second coming when he arrives in grubby mackintosh and his faded and vomit-encrusted red and black plaid “lesberjack” shirt. A pitifully detuned and untuned Lowden is wrapped in bubblewrap and cradled in his arms.
There’s definitely at least one string missing from this fretboard.
Clive is bloated and wild-eyed, with a tangled foot-long greying beard a kind of latterday, post-lockdown Syd to Bradley’s wannabe Gilmour. There will be a follow-up, there will be funk and falsetto. Once the meds have done their worst, once Clive is again, upon the sea…