(This blog post accompanies the re-issue of my debut album Eventually, on Bandcamp – click HERE to visit. I’m planning to make all of my albums available on the platform over the course of the next year, one every month. I’m offering them as an alternative to the streaming services (which offer such meagre returns to artists), making the songs downloadable at high quality. Some of the albums, this one included, are now long sold out as physical CDs. Along the way, I’m offering some background information on the albums, sharing some artwork, publicity material and pictures from the time – if you have any comments or questions, drop me a line at anthonytonermusic[at]gmail.com)…
So… who WAS the guy who went into the studio – God, almost 20 YEARS ago, to record these dozen songs - with no plan WHATSOEVER for what would happen after that?
I guess it must have been… me.
Or some version of me, anyway. One with much shorter hair and a completely different wardrobe. Creatively, still a little wet behind the ears for sure.
I called the album Eventually, because that was the answer I would give when people asked me – when are you going to record some of your OWN songs and put them out? A couple of the songs on this collection (‘Longing for Your Love’ and ‘So Good to See You Again’) actually dated right back to the late 70s, early 80s.
I had written songs in my early and mid-teens, and recorded them onto an old Hitachi tape/radio thing, so the business of writing songs was not a completely new thing (I still have those tapes – I shudder to think what might be on there). But I had more important things to be getting on with - in my late teens, I became a Dad and got married and settled down and got a job, and the ‘writing songs and recording them’ thing got put to one side.
I managed to get a job playing guitar in a country band – with Trevor Dixon and the Dixie Band – and before I knew it I was out once or twice a week playing clubs and weddings all over the country (I wore out my first two cars with the mileage I was clocking up, living in Portstewart and doing gigs in Banbridge, Newry, Enniskillen…). Somewhere in there I became a journalist on a local weekly paper, but held on to the weekend work with the band. This went on for a few years, but after falling asleep at the wheel a few times, I realised it was killing me, so I gave up the country band and all the travelling and starting playing closer to home, playing in acoustic duos for a while, and then forming the band Big Ankles (me on guitar, Robert Wilson on sax, Doc Doherty on guitar, Don McAleese on bass, Paul Coates on drums - Michael McGuinness played piano with us for a few months at the start), the band who went on to have a long-running Saturday night residency at Snappers in Portrush.
I bought a second hand Amstrad four-track recorder, and started messing around, recording in the spare room at home. A handful of new songs were coming through, but I wasn’t playing ANY of this material live. I have some of THOSE tapes too... I do remember when I wrote ‘Cousins at Funerals’, thinking – you really should put that song out, somehow. And as I edged closer to my 40s, the idea of a ‘proper’ recording started to nag at me, like a… midlife crisis or something. I had this ongoing terror that I would wake up in my late 70s some morning and be horrified that I had written all these songs and never released any of them.
So I started saving, and I applied for some money from the local Arts Committee, with the aim of putting together a four-song EP. Tom Spence from Snappers kindly donated some cash, too. And when I presented myself at Clive Culbertson’s studio for the first time in late 2001, he quite rightly urged me that if I had enough songs, I should make it a full album.
And before I knew it, I was in the same room as the talent – Johnny Scott on guitars, Liam Bradley on drums, Cloudy Henry on piano, Clive on bass and Robert Wilson (my bandmate from Big Ankles) on saxes. I learned an enormous amount from those sessions – how to write chord parts properly, how to communicate ideas to musicians. When the album was done, Robert was invaluable in helping me get the thing designed through his company Digital Page. I got a couple of newspaper colleagues to help with pictures – Peter Nash took the portrait on the front cover, and Clement Dealey took the image of me in my kitchen for the back, and some of the interior shots, which were just pictures taken around the house in Portstewart. I’ve included a few other shots here (down below) that were taken that night but not used – I loved that red kitchen. The idea of the cover shot was the passing of time, to present me as someone sitting waiting under the big clock for something to happen, with my wristwatch prominently on show.
Before I knew it, I had boxes of CDs piled up in the spare room. We took over Snappers in Portrush for a launch gig (and got a full page write up in the Coleraine Times, left, the week after) and had special guests – Big Ankles, New Moon, acoustic trio Blonde Sandwich and the late great Henry McCullough, and we raised the rafters and sold a few boxes of albums.
And then I went home and kind of… reverted to what had been my life before. I sent the CD to a couple of radio stations, got a really nice review from Desi Fisher, who was guest reviewer at that time on Ralph McLean’s Radio Ulster show, and a lovely comment from Geoff Harden in the News Letter. But I really didn’t know what I was doing with it - I didn’t do any solo gigs. And ‘in those days’ there was no social media – there were websites but they were an expensive proposition. Not even MySpace yet…
Looking at these songs now, it strikes me that it’s not a bad effort for a debut – there are a couple of these songs that I still perform in public, like ‘Cousins…’ and ‘The Way Love Goes’. And an interesting character song, ‘Getting Used to Gravity Again’. ‘Me and Lord O’Neill’ might still work, with a fresh coat of paint. ‘Her Side of the Mattress’ is a low point, but who cares? Sound-wise, I was in thrall to the studio sound of my teens, after years of listening to Steely Dan and James Taylor and the like, so the album wears its influences on its sleeve. But despite the American accent and an occasional lack of confidence, I think the performances are good – I even sneaked in a couple of my own guitar solos (‘You Must Love Me Loads’ and ‘I Blame the Parents’). And it was the beginning of my working relationship with Clive.
But what had I actually done…?
I had made the classic error of mistaking the output for the outcome. I thought the end result was that I had a CD out. The end result, actually, is that I was now a songwriter. And the CD? Well, that’s just one of the things you create. I had no plan for promoting the thing, recording another one, writing another song, any of that. And I was 37 years of age – already ANCIENT in the music business year that featured people like Sugababes and Gareth Gates.
And the business itself was starting to change. About three months after the album came out, I met an old school friend of mine on Church Street in Coleraine – a guy who’d had some experience in the music business.
‘So… how’s the album going?’ he asked.
‘Well, okay…’ I said. ‘You know, the usual… I’m trying to get it out there.’
‘Out there… to who?’ he said.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘labels and managers and publishers.’
(I had bought the Hot Press Yearbook with its dense, teeming lists of labels, publishers and managers, and was working my way through the alphabet, putting the CDs in jiffy bags with a polite covering letter, reviews etc. After a couple of months I’d got as far as the Gs)
He gave a bitter little chuckle. ‘Do yourself a favour,’ he said, ‘and save yourself the postage – they’re not even opening the envelopes anymore.’
So I never got any further through that alphabet.
But despite all of that, the album did well enough. It took some time, but it earned back its costs. But I was too green to stash that money to one side to invest in a second project. And anyway, within five years, that midlife crisis would have arrived in earnest. I would go to University as a mature student to get a Master of Arts degree, change jobs after seventeen years in local newspapers, and walk out of a long term relationship. I really pulled the ceiling down on myself.
And six years later, my hair was longer and the songs for the second album started coming thick and fast. But that’s another story…
(Below are some pictures by Peter and Paul Nash from the launch night, 15 December 2002)
