2006: The Land

Travellers on The Open Road.......

Back in the day when I was still freelancing as a film techie, My nomadic post-Oxford Scientific Films employment status took me, amongst other places to a company just off London Bridge, where I struck up a friendship with the proprietor, Bob Seaton, a charming, at-times gruff and somewhat volatile chap, who was nevertheless trustworthy, reliable, and decent, and is to have been admired for helming a successful business in an extremely capricious environment. Like me, he had directed a few commercials, and like me, he was a practising artisan-craftsman who often made his own models and committed them to film. I found myself employed sporadically in a number of capacities, from modelmaker to visualiser to artist to animator, and together we engaged in more than one difficult production.

The relationship survives to this day, although Bob now lives in Portugal, but there was a significant event during the modelmaking years which effected a number of cross-pollenations with my musical aspirations. Bob had an ongoing private project (which he and I discussed briefly on a number of occasions) to film a year in the life of a Horticultural Centre near where he lived. His idea was to create a visually stunning record of the procession of the seasons, complete with human activity, botanical transformations, wildlife, and so forth, with filters and macro shots for enhancement where appropriate. It seemed like a great concept to me… I can’t recall how long the movie was supposed to last, but I guess around thirty to forty-five minutes shot sporadically over the course of a year.. Anyway, Bob suggested that I might like to throw a few ideas for music around, and the notion intrigued me. I’d been a visiting lecturer in animation briefly at the Royal College of Art and produced incidental music for a film graduate, as well as a theme tune for one of my own films, so I set to kicking a few ideas around.

Raw Material…

The premise for the music was to produce an instrumental guitar piece which could provide a number of repeatable themes for particular moments in the movie. I hadn’t got further than to map out the overall structure, a kind of rolling verse & bridge which could be adapted and used as appropriate. The variations could be supplied in a number of ways - with 12-string guitar, Nashville-tuned, or nylon strung, each providing differing textures while referring to the underlying melodic motifs. Alas, I didn’t persevere at that time, because the film was shelved, I had joined my colleague Tom Vane, and we had our own company to run. During these later years, I’d occasionally drive down to Worthing on the South Coast, and jam with my two good friends Rob (Tolchard) and Pete (Hammerton) from the Hampton School Band ‘The Others’ - We’d do the odd pub or private local gig, playing a mix of ‘legacy’ R&B, rock, and original material..

The Old Days….Back Row: Pete Hammerton, Rob Tolchard, and Paul Stewart

Rob, who had written some wonderful songs, contributed to the repertoire, and so did I. Away from the band, though, we jammed and talked music and it so turned out that I had begun to work on the discarded film theme again - now titled ‘The Land’ (because of it’s origins), by working on the lyrical content. It turned out that Rob had some pretty cool verbal imagery for the song, and together we fashioned the tune until it was complete. We never actually performed it, though - and it would once again be shelved until I came to make my ‘aMIGO’ The content is perennially topical, though:

The Human Race has run so far,

We mine the oceans, touch the stars,

But it don’t matter where we are:

We will always need the land.

Under white Sahara skies,

Where the wheeling Vulture flies,

The futile Farmer lives or dies;

Depending on the Land:

He’s living off the Land.

Travellers on the open road,

They raise their kids, and they rack their load;

Driven on ‘cause they’ve No Fixed Abode,

Their home is on the Land.

Hide your heads you mighty powers

Livin’ in those Mirrored Towers

Pilin’ profits by the hour,

While poisoning the Land

How can they love the Land?

Reflecting blue in Ocean eyes;

Sailors struggle to disguise:

The ties that tug them, swirling, from the Sea.

Drawn by distant Neptune’s plans,

The thought of terra firma fans

Flames that burn and blaze upon the quay

Down in the valley, and across the plain

Under the Mountain’s Dark domain

Locked in one eternal chain

The Spirit of the Land

The seeds are sown, and then they grow

The cornucopæia overflows

We feel the seasons come and go

Created by the Land

The Soul is in the Land

Unbelieving to the end,

The Siver-suited  comprehend

Descending circles blowin’ cross the Sky

Slowly dawning in the void

The holy home that’s near destroyed

Fragile like a lover’s last goodbye

Out in the darkest depths of Space

Beauty calls the Human Race

But Nightmares come to take it’s place

Descending on the Land

And when at last it’s far too late;

The last Seed won’t germinate

Then all things must terminate

We’ll no longer need the Land

No longer need the Land

The Light of Day spreads across The Land…

..And so the song finally made it as a fully fledged creation. The whole of the album ‘aMIGO’ is a collection of songs from the ‘sixties to the time of recording. It was my first solo work, so I used it as a net to gather up the songs of thirty-odd years. The seed of ‘The Land’ had been planted a dozen years before in the midst of my years as a modelmaker…