ROADWORKS Adrian May Vol. 2 of Hearts &Flyovers (1989)
From Elsewhere to Halstead: singing in the 80s
In 1987, as a songwriter and solo performer on the folk music scene in England, I felt the need to find a new theme, something specific and focused. We don't really have sleevenotes as such now, but I like the word, as it indicates a space for discussion.
In my green, faux-leather 'Ferndale' unlined notebook (£2.75), according to the legend, suitable, with its rough pages, for Mounting, Pressing Flowers, as well as for Songs and Poems, I began an unpublished group of verses about Essex, to be called, I thought, An Essex Guidebook. The feel of these first drafts contain the seeds of the songs that became Roadworks, which was eventually premiered at the Sidmouth International Festival of Folk Arts two years later. In 'The Rain', the first poem, a source of the whole and the only one to make it to a typed version, some years later, on the 8 September, I wrote:
It feels right that it is raining while I write
Connected this dull Wednesday in autumn
Damp and bleak inside as if we had a thousand words for rain
Reducing the landscape to its black shadowed nature-
In Basildon and Braintree, it raineth the same, see?
This sense of the landscape was a new, but oddly familiar thought coming to the surface, one gathered from years of playing in little village halls in the English folk barn-dance band, The Metric Foot Band, with friends like Peter Booth, who wrote Steel Guitar Music. The urge to write about what was local and immediate which came to me in the seventies (see From Braintree to Bovinger: cycling in the seventies ), and what was now coming to me, was acknowledging how strange and half-alienating was the suburban half-road, half-country and half-housing world I lived and drove around in. There was a bracketed word in the original draft title of the projected verses: An Essex (Suburban) Guidebook. Sensing the metaphorical power of the 'suburban roadscape' as I called it at the time, I hoped to write about our beings half defined by the madness of travel and building and half resisting it with love and nature. I felt I'd found my theme in the road outside my little house down an alley in Halstead, my 'healthy place' in North Essex.
There is an order of songs as they appear on recordings, arrived at so as to give the listener contrast and preparation, to build towards meaning, then there is another order, that of composition.
I still feel that this group of songs is the most unified and coherent work of my solo singing life and I still sing many of the songs today. (Colchester, 2006).
All songs written/ performed Adrian May;
'Steel Guitar Music' written Peter F Booth
with Jon May, triangle & '745 CER', Morris Minor
MYCD 6.2 2006
Sleevenotes to 'ROADWORKS' a CD of folk songs written and performed by Adrian May
'It wasn't until 1st of January 1988 that I began 'The Woman at the Side of the Road'. The strangeness of that familiar world was what I felt I needed to get at. It was not inspired by any historic ghost, although the area is not short of those, but by seeing a drunk woman staggering by the A130, and turning her into my ghost, my muse in alienation.
Loads of us have seen her there
The woman at the side of the road
As we drive through this landscape
Seat-belted, contraflowed
Her face is ever changing
Uncanny, who could guess
We cynics could be haunted by
Her piteous, wild distress
She does not look you in the eye
No gesture does she make
She does not run into the road
To make you swerve or brake
But staggers in some awful hell
As cut off as we are
Alone and quite unreachable
In each fast, private car
Who is this woman at the side of the road
How can she disturb us so
This ghost who haunts a ghostless world
Familiar, but she no-one we know
The police have searched the area
The scientists agree
There's absolutely no-one there
For anyone to see
But I saw her one afternoon
In the broad daylight
And although I felt no fear at all
I couldn't sleep that night
For it seemed to me that she was all
The dreams that we had lost
The soul of all this soulless world
The simple human cost
And every tortured vacancy
Of life we can't renew
And if it's true that she does not exist
It's because she's me and you
Who is this woman at the side of the road
How can she disturb us so
This ghost who haunts a ghostless world
Unfamiliar, but she someone we know
Loads of us have seen her there
'On the M25'
The next song, which could have been the title song, if my idea of a story to hang the songs around, of a man asleep in a traffic jam on the M11 dreaming, had been used. 'On The M25' tried to use as many jokes as I knew about the then new motorway.
If you ever doubt that the world's gone too far
If you fancy the cash, if you fancy the car
If material bliss doesn't get on your wick
Just get on the road for the proof we are sick
And for the end result of all this madness just drive
To that terminal race-track the M25
Driving round and round on the M25
Looking for an exit and trying to survive
If you see me there please remind me I'm alive
Driving round and round on the M25
With the traffic and fumes you feel tubercular
But they say it's better than the North Circular
Cars can convert you, they have replaced God
The meekest of men becomes a murderous sod
If driving around's driving you round the bend
Well the M25 goes around without end
Like a concrete necklace all around London's neck
It's the ultimate roundabout (and good for a wreck)
Chorus .. Driving round and round on the M25 ...
So pray as you're driving round like dervishes
But pray alone 'cause there ain't many services
Motorists cheered when it opened at last
Now we can go nowhere incredibly fast
The inside lane's empty, let's all go insane
And drive nose-to-tail in the fast lane
But you get there quicker, yes, you get there and back
Gives you time for an early heart attack
Chorus ... Driving round and round on the M25 ...
Dartford Tunnel, Friday, hours to wait
You could do it faster on one roller skate
You've given up smoking, you go for a jog
Then drive eighty-five miles an hour in the fog
With ninety ml's of blood to a hundred of gin
You think you're immortal in your flash piece of tin
When motorists die they have to drive down in hell
They say: Hang on a minute, I know this road well
(I think I'm)
Chorus ... Driving round and round on the M25 ...
'The Back Roads'
'The Back Roads' was the half that found truth amid the strangeness, with the wonder of what remains, despite everything. 'We're robbed of fascination/ On this suburban straight road/ Where everybody has thrown/ Their dirt and money' goes an edited out section.
Not far from all the new world
The old one still quietly lives on
Adapting like foxes have done
To human wasteland
The shy ones and the brave ones
The gipsy still strolls in the lane
As if we had slipped back again
It's still real knowing
The way you're going
I prefer the back roads
Full of danger and beauty it's true
It may not be the quickest way through
But it's the pretty way, the old way
The hard way, the dark way, the sly way
And if you like the wide, bland highway …
There's no point in me going with you
'Less you prefer the back roads too
The big wide road is moving
In processional ritual routine
But all that it really means
Is still more sameness
The rich have bought the cottage
But how can the wild be tame
Somehow we will always remain
Who are the strangers
Through all these changes
Chorus ... I prefer the back roads ...
'On the 339'
'On The 339' came unbidden out of writing the first three, more self-conscious songs. I knew I'd tapped into a deep source in myself. Comic songs like this I find the most difficult to write. Seemingly most mechanical, for me they have to be the more inspired. I knew I'd moved into the tradition of comic songwriters on the cosmic nature of the bus: see Flanders and Swan's Transports of Delight and Jake Thackray's Country Bus.
Some people sing of seasons or of places they have seen
Of sex some wax emotional to prove where they have been
If they grew up a mile from the nearest one like us
Maybe they would be like me and sing about a bus
A love-hate relationship it was, to tell the truth
And sometime now it seems to me I spent my entire youth
On the 339, on the 339
My only way out to the world, that rare of Green lifeline
In the wind or rain or snow or when weather was fine
You would find me waiting for the 339
If you were early, it was late and vice versa of course
It felt like some mad marriage in a land without divorce
A Zen-like contradiction was this London Country route
And waiting was an early form of 'Trivial Pursuit'
All the time it took you, you could read a book right through
And if you fancied fiction, well the timetable would do
Chorus ... On the 339, on the 339 ...
If someone said be punctual, you just had to decline
You reflect the weakness of humanity somehow
Your memories come back to me affectionately now
For instance one cold winter I was glad to get a seat
Where the faulty heater wheezed on to my frozen feet
I saw two pigs were mating from the top deck where I sat
Conductor said: Don't get ideas, it's far to cold for that
Chorus ... On the 339, on the 339 ...
Liable to break down going up a steep incline
You were my Starship Enterprise, the only link I'd got
In my young day, the only way to go, boldly or not
Right from Harlow New Town to the Warley loony bin
The same but Harlow's madder because no-one locks them in
And if I'm late on judgement day, I'll swear to God, no sweat
It's because I was waiting at the bus stop just to get
Chorus ... On the 339, on the 339 ...
If you come for me I'll know God's given me a sign
Yes, you would find me waiting for the 3 3 9
'Driving Home'
The final song of the original cassette album, 'Driving Home' was a deliberate celebration, reminiscent of the verse that started it all, with its rain motif. It was a deliberate use of an old folk style, using the harmonica to suggest the melancholy nature of space in landscape, later expanded on when recording the album.
Driving home at night in the rain
This dark and empty world's not so insane
And the peace and the space lend the passing street some grace
The world's work is over and it soothes the weary brain
Until you feel human again
Driving home at night in the rain
Yellow street lights make the road look golden
Traffic jams like bad day-dreams all gone
All the world spread out for our beholding
Enchantment restored until the dawn
If this life has nothing fair to show you
Here's the beauty that it hides by day
If your home's a far off place to go to
Sometimes it's an easier way
Chorus ... Driving home at night in the rain ...
While the daytime kingdom's safely sleeping
Creatures of the night call it their own
Done with all the striving and the weeping
This unnatural place is more like home
Think of friends I should have seen more often
As the homeward road comes into view
And I pray our troubled way can soften
Like this transformation coming true
Chorus ... Driving home at night in the rain ...
'The Village Ball'
The first demo recordings, which I sent to my pal Alan Bearman, Artistic Director of Sidmouth Festival, included 'The Village Ball', written much earlier for, but never performed by the Metric Foot Band, and Steel Guitar Music , which had been performed by the band. I had to wrestle the song from Peter Booth, who was in the process of rejecting it. I insisted that we used it and volunteered to sing it too, as I thought it was exactly the sort of song I was trying to write. He had got my theme better than me, I still think. Also on that first demo was a mock-surfing song called 'There Ain't No Surfing (Down in Shoeburyness)', written for the Colchester-based Hooligan Band, led by the equally legendary Phil Manchester. There is a live version of this daft item somewhere about.
Come around the country lanes, I'll take you to a place
Where they take you to their hearts if they do not know your face
Forget about the showbiz spectacular
Come with me and get into the vernacular
I like dancing in the village hall
Don't need to go into the town at all
Somebody said that small is beautiful
I like dancing in the village hall
I like dancing to the village band
In terms of music, well you understand
They might be useless but to us it's grand
I like dancing to the village band
So come with me to the village ball
With the village band in the village hall
Come with me to the village ball
With the village band in the village hall
A scruffy little building by the old churchyard
It's not flash, 'cause no-one has to try that hard
Big-time fun is just a smidgen, us
Our good times are quite indigenous
Chorus ... I like dancing in the village hall ...
Get on to that dusty floor and move your city feet
Forget the grotty toilets and the lack of heat
And home entertainment that is digital
Tonight we do it live and aboriginal
We do our thing at weekends, we go down to the clubs
That meet in the back rooms you find behind pubs
And it's like coming home when you head for the bar
There's a band in big hats who play sad steel guitar
And there's cowboys and cowgirls, sheriffs and squaws
When the band takes a break, then they practice fast draws
And I know people laugh but it's there I belong
Where there's steel guitar music and a slow country song
We've been farming this country since I don't know when
Then they got some machines in and didn't need men
So we all moved away, there was work in the town
And when we looked back all the hedges were down
Now it's like Oklahoma, the wind and the rain
Blowing dustbowls and people off a sad empty plain
And the sound of the wind that blows us along
Is in steel guitar music and a slow country song
Now you smile when you see us; cowboys, how quaint
And of course you're much smarter-forget it, you ain't
You've got folk clubs and discos and fancy night spots
Seems we all like pretending to be what we're not
Going down the same road in our cars, only mine
Has its radio fixed so I get Patsy Cline
So why've you stopped laughing-hell, there ain't nothing wrong
It's just steel guitar music and a slow country song
'Lay-by Love' brought me back to the sinister theme and included my other obsession, writing-wise, of that time, that of love. The double-album, which included Roadworks, also included the album Out Of Love, now available elsewhere on the internet . The overall title of the two together on cassette was Hearts and Flyovers.
In the middle of an ordinary day
Beside the bustle of the broad public highway
The lovers meet in this neutral no-man's-land
Forbidden secrets shared, home revolutions planned
There is no permanence, it's motion for the rich
Go fast then you won't see the dosser in the ditch
They come and go in all directions, lacking one
Except just off the road where they can sometimes run
And it's lay-by love, they're only stopping here just long enough
Amid the rubbish and the traffic roaring past
Unlikely place for any dream to last
Snatching a moment as they're passing through
There's only lay-by love for travellers like you
They dreamed the dreams they had amid this transience
They blamed their lovelessness on fate and circumstance
They wanted simple things not castles in the sky
They found this nameless place and soon they'll say good bye
Then they'll move on as if they didn't have a care
And keep on moving thinking they will get somewhere
If it can still be heaven in a lover's kiss
They want the truth, they don't care where or what it is
Chorus ... And it's lay-by love, they're only stopping here ...
There used to be a cottage stranding over there
What used to be can't help them here or anywhere
It's for the tourists now and nothing's plain and real
If love is fiction, then what is it that they feel?
Chorus ... And it's lay-by love, they're only stopping here ...
'English Driving Blues'
English Driving Blues was the comic side to Driving Home and reunited me with the ukulele, a big feature of my English comic thing earlier in my solo singing life, and this brought in the Little America problem, which remains in areas like war, and so on.
Americans will sing to you of cars and open space
Of driving all night long to some far off romantic place
We get envious and try 'till we're green in the face
But England is so small that we just can't keep up the pace
Our roads are far too narrow, far to short and wiggle-y
And if you drove all night you'd only end up in the sea
All we do in England is crawl around in queues
We could do far better with a pair of running shoes
But we just sit and listen to the latest traffic news
And get the snail-track, tail-back, English Driving Blues
Americans have room to move and history's a blank
So places sound romantic to the liberated Yank
Ongar Chipping Ongar's not a song that's sung by Frank
I Left My Heart in Hartlepool's not worth filling your tank
If Springsteen was in England, 'stead of Cadillac that's pink
He'd be mending punctures on his pushbike in the sink
Chorus ... All we do in England ...
Americans will boast but I LA among the stars
There's one big traffic jam, no decent train to shift your arse
Perhaps they'll take a rain-check and relocate on Mars
When there's no room for people, only room for cars
Or when what space is left more road-building consumes
They'll just salute the flag and then drop dead from all the fumes
Chorus ... All we do in England ...
Americans are on the road but here is a surprise
Soon the road will be on them so listen all you guys
In your Porsches and Sierras where you like to fantasise
In this small world your brm-brm game's a futile exercise
These dreams of power and speed they are so daft they make me puke
As daft as playing blues or rock and roll upon a uke
Chorus ... All we do in England ...
'Nowhere Now'
Then followed the writing of some rejected songs like 'Oil and Blood', never finished (too dark and wordy). Nowhere Now , the first song on the album, in a way, came last of this main batch and was a way back to the theme via love and narrative, so seemed a good introductory piece, with its mid-tempo feel (not something I do often).
Once we lived along the narrow lanes, loving rich diversity
Till you learnt to live like all the rest, when you moved away from me
And the narrow lanes were knocked down, our home is a precinct these days
And you call me nostalgic, as if to change were for the best always
Home is where the heart is, but we broke them both somehow
Once everyone used to live somewhere, but everywhere is nowhere now
Oh the shops, the streets, saloons, the souls, the same; the world's so small
And we wish that it was wide again, not one-horse multiple
The only difference left is in civil warring and bigotry
And the wreckage of traditions already too far gone to set us free
Chorus … Once everyone used to be somewhere …
There must be something missing say the sheep
Who laugh at those who've got a soul to keep
Oh the road you took away from here is so fast and oh so wide
And the car is oh so comfortable, it's such an easy ride
But I recall we used to stroll arm in arm down that narrow lane
But that's one place it wouldn't be so easy now to travel to again
Chorus … Once everywhere used to be somewhere …
'Appearing in Cabaret'
More regrouping came with the recognition of older songs which fitted in to the whole, like Appearing in Cabaret , which came from a memory of seeing a poster in Braintree for 60s band The Equals playing at a cabaret venue, without their main songwriter Eddy Grant. The Ongar Push & Pull was a childhood memory of a steam train, and was an even older song, included here as an extra track with Steel Guitar Music , both in the form of very basic demo-tape recordings.
We once had a song and it almost
Made us a bit of a name
Might have been a one-hit wonder
We still play that song the same
Once we were wild and hopeful
The brashness of youth held us sway
Sometimes it seems like a mockery
To see what the posters say
Appearing in cabaret
Now we're appearing in cabaret
Here at the end of a working day
We don't like the style, we like the pay
Appearing in cabaret
All the old favourites we sing and play
We draw the line when we won't do My Way
When we're appearing in cabaret
At the end of a working day
Appearing in cabaret, appearing in cabaret
Do we just go through the motions
Trot out the old lies anew
Though we look old and daft, we still love it
Or like to believe that we do
We get to the club about sixish
Get in tune, set up the gear
Put on the suits we would never
Have worn in our early years
We only see friends and family
For the occasional day
Then back to our glamorous lifestyle
Up some rainy motorway
Appearing in cabaret
Chorus ... Now we're appearing in cabaret ...
So if you ever should wonder
Where they are now, the unseen
The fallen, the failing, the foolish
The has-been or might-have-been
They don't just jack it in gracefully
And it's true what people say
About the old stagers who never die
But merely fade away
Appearing in cabaret
When I was just a little boy
I went on a train
I walked to Blake Hall Station through
The little country lanes
The noise and steam really frightened me
But it was such a thrill
To be riding, riding on the Ongar Push and Pull
Bring back the Ongar Push and Pull
Steaming down the line
Bring back the Ongar Push and Pull
Get us there on time
Steam in style through the woods and fields
The train would soon be full
If you bring back, bring back the Ongar Push and Pull
From Ongar up to Epping town
Through Blake Hall and North Weald
Through parts of Epping Forest
And by leafy lanes and fields
When the London Tube took it over, well
It was a bit more dull
Than riding, riding on the Ongar Push and Pull
Chorus ... Bring back the Ongar Push and Pull ...
But now they want to close the line
Because it doesn't pay
Everybody has a car to go to work today
But let's do something that's just for fun
To make our lives more full
Oh bring back, bring back the Ongar Push and Pull
Chorus ... Bring back the Ongar Push and Pull ...
'Old Morris Minor'
Later, nearer when the main recordings were done, the last two songs written arrived. 'Old Morris Minor' dealt with the theme of unearned nostalgia. The first vehicle I drove to gigs in was a yellow, ex-Post Office Telephone Morris Minor van. When I recorded the song I wanted some characteristic sounds of that car, so I went in to an office outside which I often saw one parked. The owner turned out to be a woman journalist, who exchanged my story as a singer (which I don't think she ever used) for driving by me a couple of times, while I held a Dictaphone to catch the 'trumpeting' sound of the exhaust, for which she may have even given me the accepted term. I later sent her a copy of the cassette, but received no response. Maybe she was offended by the cynicism of the song and could not detect the underlying affection, or maybe she just thought it was no good, or not worth the effort. Still, her car, 745 CER, which she called 'Ceri', was credited. The only other credit was my brother, who played Cajun-style triangle in On The M25.
One of the many unattractive things about men
Is the way they go on about cars
But even the most liberated of them
Reverts to automotive type vernaculars
And women too admit it's true
And won't give you a shiner
When they say I used to have one and I loved it too
My old Morris Minor
You loved your old Morris Minor
Trumpeting* down memory lane
Traveller, Saloon, or even a van
This shameless nostalgia's on the increase and it will not wane
Don't make 'em like you or that car anymore
In mythical Britain nothing's finer
Oh, Oh, you're old, your old
You loved your old Morris Minor
There's something just like a time machine in their power
For hindsight has made them magical
They seem to remind you of your finest hour
If you never had a fine one in your life at all
Did you distain the country lane
Your memory's a re-definer
And you long for that rustic charm once again
In your old Morris Minor
Chorus ... You loved your old Morris Minor ...
Built to last, so unlike us, except in our fantasies
Tourism turns incestuous and buys back sold identities
You don't say bring me my bow of Blake's burning gold
Or bring me my arrows of desire
But bring me that wondrous motor of old
And make our grey, unpleasant land a bit less dire
If Christ revived, what would he drive, to make our road diviner
I see him stuck in a queue on the M25
In his old Morris Minor
Chorus ... You loved your old Morris Minor ...
[* The characteristic sound of the Morris Minor exhaust]
'This is England'
'This Is England' came at the same time and seemed to be the song which dealt with the themes of the whole most directly, a final attempt to describe the positive love and hate of my native place, through a dark acknowledgement of the importance of place. I finished the song on St George's Day, 1989. There is a liberal orthodoxy which denies love of place as a kind of incipient fascism, but in these songs I make no apologies for wanting to contradict this:
Then and now … restored to our banality
Bowing across the sheltering county to our rain-god
As I put it in 'The Rain', which was where it started. These ideas and strong feelings still inhabit me and I am still working on writing about locality and tradition, trying to get from any dreamed Elsewhere to Halstead, back home to somewhere in Essex: Disowned as nowhere by us all, but where we fit our face.
Another restless night, I drive off in the darkness
And end up in the old town of our youth
The glory of the past is refuge for the hopeless
Our future's just a refuge from the truth
The best thing about this place is the road to somewhere else
That's what you said and I was gone as well
Believing in this myth, we lost ourselves
But this is it, this is England
In front of my own face
Where I started from is what I am
The sea is eating into the abandoned factory
The motorway's consuming the dead rusticity
And somehow we must say that this is England
Not some misty half-imagined place
Somehow we must say that this is England
Conjuring transcendence from disgrace
Somehow in this half-enchanted place
The half-demolished front is painted loud in sorrows
All out amusements derelict like this
Out of this hopeless mess foretelling bright tomorrows
Out of this property what kind of bliss
I see us by the roadside with bored teenage ambition
I see us in our smug suburban home
This modern myth has left us all alone
And this is it, this is England
This half-abandoned place
Where we ended up is what we are
Economies consuming the native sense of self
But I'll swear I'll find another way to get to somewhere else
Somewhere I can say that this is England
Somewhere in this half-demolished place
Somewhere I can say that this is England
Conjuring transcendence from disgrace
Somewhere in this half enchanted place
Somewhere I can dare to show my face
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