Get all 15 Owd Scrat Records releases available on Bandcamp and save 70%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Surface Industries II, Song (After Nature Past)/Song (After Nature Future) [single], Surface Industries I, Tony's a Winner, an opera in one act, This Job's Forever - The Peel Session [EP], Stolen Things (The Creeping Things Remix) [single], L E T M E T A K E Y O U T H E R E [single], The Seven Oracles of Gog Magog, and 7 more.
1. |
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Where there's loads at the bus stop on
The High Street,
There are crowds you just have to push yourself through.
And it doesn’t really worry me,
The High Street.
But I don’t like crowds that are in an enclosed place.
Get around town,
Get around town,
Where the people look good,
Where the music is loud.
Get around town,
No need to stand proud,
Add your voice to the sound of the crowd.
Where there's something happening,
A concert,
Or a band, or a show, then that's fantastic.
I quite like that sort of atmosphere.
A concert
With nobody there, wouldn't be the same.
Get in line now,
Get in line now,
Stay in time with the rhythm and rhyme.
Get around town,
Get around town,
Where the people look good,
Where the music is loud.
Get around town,
No need to stand proud,
Add your voice to the sound of the crowd.
This place was the entrance to
The nightclub,
Where people queued up to go downstairs,
And the crowds were pushing to get in,
The nightclub.
I did go in but it weren’t my scene.
Get in line now,
Get in line now,
Stay in time with the rhythm and rhyme.
Get around town,
Get around town,
Where the people look good,
Where the music is loud.
Get around town,
No need to stand proud,
Add your voice to the sound of the crowd.
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2. |
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(Main harmony.)
I’m on a plane in the dead of night,
By a window on the plane’s left side.
Behind the wing, I can see down,
But the wing takes up most of the view.
Though the wing is just discernible,
It’s dark outside and the only light
Is a white navigation light,
It is right at the end of the wing.
We are in cloud, as the dream starts off.
The light is enveloped in a mist
And has an eerie kind of glow.
There is a vapour trail from the wing.
In the cabin, there’s silence except
For the drone of the aircraft engines.
No talking, no children crying,
No flight attendants around, nothing.
I’m aware of the aircraft turning
To the left, I look out the window.
We are no longer in the clouds.
In the distance the dawn is breaking.
There are lights on a coastline below
And lights in what I guess is the sea.
The engines change tone, power down,
In preparation to land. Dream ends.
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3. |
Dear Guest
08:58
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Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Manchester.
Dear guest,
Welcome to the hotel. Please read this letter, you will get an idea of what a room attendant’s job involves. Do not tell the housekeeping manager about this letter, please just replace it in the draw when you have read it.
We tidy up the bed, make the pillows nice and tidy. Make sure there’s no dust around. Replace new linen every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s messy or if it’s clean, this is part of the job. Toilets and bathrooms - mirror - have to be nice and clean; no dust around. We put things where they belong. Tidy up everything, valance, pillows. Vacuuming has to be done every day.
We do the function and meeting rooms on certain shifts. The head concierge says the meeting rooms are named after political Radicals. He has to know for when guests ask.
Where the hotel is now, it used to be a field. The names are of leaders who organised a meeting on the field in the eighteenth century. Nineteenth maybe. A meeting for political reform. Cotton mill workers dressed in their Sunday best, men and women and their children.
Singing the popular songs of the day. They would call them folk songs now. Musical bands blaring. But men on horseback waded into the meeting, trampling bodies, swinging their sabres. People were killed. There is a Bamford room, a meeting room, on the first floor of the hotel. After a meeting it has to be vacuumed, table cleared and wiped clean. The concierge says it is named after the weaver Samuel Bamford, who was there at the gathering, at the massacre, in the field. Bamford described the event in a book he wrote years later.
Ten minutes after the violence, he wrote, the empty field was covered with debris.He saw a black banner sprawled on the ground, with the word ‘Love’, a heart, and two clasped hands on it all painted in white. A man’s cap, with a sprig of laurel, half hidden by muddy sods. Women’s bonnets all around, one made with floral crimped material. A shoe without a sole stuck deep in a rut. A trumpet. A drum. A flute. Branches of laurel.
So they built the Free Trade Hall, thirty-odd years later. In memory of the dead in the field. That’s this building. Now it’s a hotel.
In occupied rooms we do the job. But we never touch the guests stuff, where they put it, where they set it. We knock and make sure if a guest is in the room. Sometimes the guest is in and says, ‘Oh, you can do it’: then we clean the room with them there.
It’s only possible to have a social life some weekends. Some people have a second job too so on the week days it’s difficult to go out. Like cleaning in an office, getting home every night, ten, ten-thirty, sometimes nine, it depends how busy things are.
The concierge also tells guests about The Free Trade Hall, the concerts they had here when it was a music venue. Some rooms in the hotel are named after musicians. The concierge says he went to a famous concert, when Bob Dylan went electric. In the sixties. Bob did a first half, all acoustic songs, just with his guitar.
Then Dylan came back on with an electric band for the second half. People booed, clapped slowly. They thought it wasn’t the music of the people, folk music. If it was electric it was a betrayal. Of folk traditions, that go back through time. It became a battle between the performers and the audience, but with words, with sounds. Dylan replied to the heckles by saying, ‘Play fucking loud’ to his band. He liked the volume, the thrill of the resonating chords in the echoing hall, the sound of modern life.
‘How does it feel?’ he sang, ‘You're invisible now…’ The concierge tells this to people who book into the Dylan suite. It’s the most expensive one on the top floor.
The concierge says he stayed behind after everyone else left the concert. When the room lights went on, he just stared at the empty stage, and the floor where the audience had been.
He looked at the torn ticket-stubs, the ripped up programmes. The cigarette packets, green and white Woodbines, blue and white Players Navy Cut. With the glittering entrails of foil lining. Smashed glass all around, glinting in the house lights. Everywhere little white cigarette stub specks. A pale blue and white, woollen, unremembered or abandoned scarf. Making the shape of a double u. A pair of black plastic dark glasses. Broken.
Sometimes there is lost property left in rooms when people leave. It’s put in the office, and kept for three or four months. So if the guests ring it is sent to their address. So many things… like shirts, glasses, books. That sort of thing.
Sometimes parties are happening in the rooms, quite often. We get used to it. We sometimes try to get a chance to slow down, or sit for a while in a room. Today, on my last day in the job, this room was very untidy. The room you are in now. Lots of stuff everywhere. I lay back on the mattress. The sheets smelt of perfume. I turned the bedside radio up really loud. I felt the warmth of the room and the softness of the duvet, I smelt the left-over breakfast on the tray and the spilt vodka on the table. I ate a pastry from the tray. There was a smell of perfume on the sheets. I stroked the side of my neck. I was imagining the guests nakedness on the sheets the night before. I slipped my hand into my skirt. I felt the little hairs on my lower stomach. I pushed my face into the sheets to smell the expensive perfume. I moved my fingers down and rubbed myself up slowly as I lay on the mattress. After a while I decided to write this letter, which I have almost finished. I will leave it in the draw when I have written it. I will then leave the room, and leave the mess as I found it.
As I write, I can see wine stains on the bedside table. A wine glass is left on the rim of the bath. A bra strewn on the floor. Marks on the TV cabinet. Sheets coming away from the mattress. A room service breakfast tray is left on the bed, the food half eaten. Shampoo has been spilt on a shelf in the bathroom. It is slowly forming a pool around the small plastic bottle. Cigarette stubs on the table. On the carpet a towel, biscuit crumbs, plastic bags. The TV is left on, it’s screen reflecting the whiteness of the bed sheets in the morning sun.
Please put this letter back in the draw and leave it for the next guest to read. Thank you for your time.
Respectfully, yours.
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4. |
Open Plan
04:13
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I am a Library Officer.
Often I’m on the enquiry desk,
which I personally enjoy a lot.
You get every type of person in,
a five-year-old might want story books,
or someone doing a PhD.
You don’t have to know the answer but
you have to know where to find it though.
Occasionally I‘m on the counter.
I job share so I am not full time.
Some days we work nine in the morning
to seven at night, quite a long day.
Other days I do a shorter day.
I have worked here for twelve years in all.
I’m not from Leigh, I am from Essex.
At first, I had a southern accent
but I think a lot has rubbed off now,
working with local people and all.
I like to get out for some fresh air.
We have CCTV cameras now.
We had a spell a year or two back,
people’s purses were being stolen.
Videos were sent to the police.
It’s today’s modern society.
Now we have security people,
they have stopped the main trouble makers.
We have security barriers.
We still have a problem with stealing.
When I was a child you didn’t speak,
It’s not like that now in libraries.
Libraries like ours are open plan
and impossible to keep quiet.
It is quite a busy library,
we‘ve 800 people in a day
on average but sometimes even more.
We open some days at ten o’clock,
we open some days at half past nine.
Four nights we’re open until seven,
and then one night a week until five.
We are open Saturdays as well,
under pressure to open Sundays,
but that has so far been resisted.
There’s the same people waiting outside
at opening time every morning,
they come in to read the newspapers.
They can be noisier than the kids.
Monday we get the crossword people.
After doing the Sunday crosswords.
They want to know answers to questions
preventing them getting the big prize,
they always offer to share the prize
but it never happens. I don’t mind,
helping people with crosswords is fine,
but I like to know it’s a crossword.
You think it’s a reference enquiry,
sometimes you can end up spending a
disproportionate amount of time,
so I am always appreciative
if they tell me it’s for a crossword.
The other day a student came in,
they always want the book as of now,
sending for it is not good enough!
We have people who are quite lonely,
it’s a free place, its warm and it’s dry,
people come to meet other people.
The elderly who can’t sleep at night,
they’ll want several books and read them all
by the next day, which is a bit sad,
but it’s nice to think we’re there for them.
We had one elderly gentleman,
he actually died just recently,
he would want true stories of the War
which we then used to order for him.
We get quite a few people like him,
real regulars, we get to know them.
This gentleman died and he’ll be missed,
staff sent a card to his family.
Sometimes you see particular books
as you’re going ‘round the library,
and you know that someone might like that.
I’ve worked here for thirteen years or so, it feels longer than that sometimes when they call you up from downstairs for something, but it’s a nice place. My job description’s “caretaker-driver” but you very rarely see a driver coming in here doing caretaking duties… always the caretakers going out doing the driving. At the moment we’ve got Terry who’s just come in, he’s been doing a job, Fred’s on at two, Jack’s doing this job, they’re all caretakers, Chris who’s the caretaker at Wigan, he would be on a van, but he’s just had a car accident so he’s off at the moment, and Mick, the lad who would normally be on that if Chris weren’t on it, he’s on holiday, so we’re a bit low at the moment. We work it between ourselves where normally two of us are around… The job’s got easier since the alcohol ban came on the front because we used to get drunks and drug addicts on the front. Chairs… we’ve been after new chairs for years… they’re all falling to pieces. Wigan have got a conference room or something, film projectors going onto walls and all that, we’ve no real up to date equipment. They could really make a lot of use of this as a facility for conferences but they won’t pay the money out so we just make do as best we can. We used to have our own council. There’s me and Fred who do the shift work with the function room, this week, I’m on 7.30 - 3.15, it is the normal shift. At the beginning of the week, we’ll do an extra half hour on the Monday to make our hours up for the week and you have Friday off. You’ll come in 7.30, open the doors to the upper levels because the cleaners don’t have the keys to the gallery and everything, I’ll come in, do my jobs, just come in and open the doors up, go across to the local paper shop, get the morning papers. We have a reading area for the library and we get the old blokes in first thing in the morning for a couple of hours reading all the papers, stamp them and book them all in and there’s the magazines. The same magazines every month, the staff actually book them in and put special security tags in ‘cos they do go missing. Just the watering of any plants, checking round the building. After that, that any windows are okay, there’s none been broken, check the fire exits every morning, just that they’ll open and shut and everything. Once a week, a couple of fire points are tested, normally on a Wednesday morning. It’s just like a wailing, siren sound. We normally have a drill once every month, we’ll do one with staff. We’ve got two fire exits.
I’m the local history
officer. I’m based here, but
I am not actually a part
of the Leigh library staff,
as they took local history
out of libraries and put it
with the heritage sector.
And I am not from the area.
I’ve done a canal-side walk
every year, nine years or so.
I’ve done a cemetery walk,
I go around the cemeteries
telling people all about them,
some of the funeral customs,
tell people who’s buried there.
Names on gravestones don’t mean anything.
Flesh on the bones as it were.
Cemeteries are really a
kind of social history
of the local area.
Not everyone is buried there,
some have been cremated and
their remains are not there, but
the majority are buried there.
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5. |
On This Pitch
02:59
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I started my day at the Big Issue
and bought five magazines to start me off.
I then walked from the office to Tesco,
sold the first magazine there straight away.
On this pitch I stood ten minutes
before I sold another magazine.
I sold two magazines right after that.
The Tesco security guard came out
and talked to me and my girl Vanessa.
On this pitch I stood for a while.
The security guard said we were on
the link. He had watched us walking through town.
The link is the network of cameras
set up all around town, watching us all.
On this pitch I sold all my mags.
On this pitch I sold all of my mags.
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6. |
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7. |
Tea, Coffee and Desserts
02:48
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I watch the clock that’s on the wall.
It’s ten-thirty AM,
the alarm is barking. I don't want to miss the bus.
My body is so tired.
I feel so exhausted,
I was up late last night finishing essay writing.
The bus journey is twenty-five minutes.
The words appear in front
of my eyes: The Mayflower. I spend most of my time here.
Tuition fees are the reason I work.
I prepare the tea, coffee and desserts.
This is my first job of the morning, every morning. Half an hour later
customers start to trickle in, hungry.
A regular turns up.
He always has the same, beef satay sauce and fried rice.
I watch the clock that’s on the wall,
I watch the clock that’s on the wall,
I watch the clock that’s on the wall,
then have a cigarette in the crew room.
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8. |
Dust
07:49
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I am a hotel maid. I do the net curtains last when I clean a room, because I like to open, look out the window. I like to see. And it is calming as well, and I do forget that I’m in work, I just stand there. Staring.
At work today, staring out the window towards the sea, I was thinking of that pirate ship ride at Pleasureland that I had a go on last summer. After I got off it, I’m not being funny, I was wandering round the theme park all dizzy and queasy like a drunken sailor walking around the swaying deck, and then I puked up all my candy-floss over a fibre glass mermaid.
Another time, in the hotel bar, I was gazing out to sea again, and a guest asked me, “So, when’s your ship coming in?” I replied to him with a song, a song I wrote myself, about a mysterious old-fashioned pirate gunship that suddenly appears offshore, just like that warship that arrived in the bay, out of nowhere, during the great transport strike, it’s guns pointed at the city.
Anyway, my song tells of how I always stop for a moment when I’m cleaning a room and look out the window. This time I smile knowingly, because the dark ship I can see in the harbour, with its massive sails unfurled and its guns loaded, has come to bring my revenge, my pay-back, for all I have had to put up with. The city is then flattened by the ship’s cannons. Only my hotel’s left standing, with me inside it, staring out at the oranges and yellows of the burning city, until the smoke blackens the other side of the window I’ve just flippin’ cleaned. I have a good laugh at that. The ship in my song then vanishes with myself on board, and a cargo of refugees.
“There is a somewhat nervous disposition among the passengers…[but] Painful impressions on land disappear quickly at sea and soon seem merely like dreams.”
My song then tells of being adrift from the known world, on the floating dream of exile. Between one place, which gets more distant, and a new place that is unreachable.
What I always think is, you have to clean that last person out of the room for the next person coming in it. That’s how I see it. When I come in a room I just strip the bed off, take the rubbish out, then just basically start making the bed, dusting, polishing, hoovering. It’s hard work.
Windows tend to get splashed with the salt of the seawater, and they get rotten. It’s nasty, the windows go horrible. Certain rooms are right in the sun, so if the sun shines in, that creates dust. Some of the girls tend to put the light on and draw the curtains when they’re dusting, because the dust becomes more visible in the sun, you can see it in the air, looking for somewhere to settle.
The pirate ship in my song suddenly appears off the coast of an island, somewhere in the middle of a distant ocean. The vessel has changed its form, now it’s a modern freighter. It still has me and the refugees onboard, but we’ve also picked up some new refugees from a sinking fishing boat we came across. The authorities that rule the island don’t want any refugees on their land and don’t allow our ship to dock. The boat waits offshore for days and days, no country willing to take responsibility for the displaced people on the ship.
Which reminds me of another song, one my nan used to sing to me, not her favourite one about the seaside donkey who didn’t like his pancakes sweet, that was a good one, but the one about the hundreds of boats, years ago, that were rowed out to the end of a seaside pier, so that the lower-class people of the town could be close to the lights and sounds of the society ball going on there. My nan sang of how the laughter and music from the bright pavilion drifted over the water to the little boats, and of how the boats were almost invisible on the grey expanse of the sea.
TV pictures of the ship full of refugees, the ship in my own song I mean, are shot from helicopters flying above the vessel, and shown all around the world. When you look down from above, the refugees are no more than dark little dots next to the containers on the open deck, and this time there are no cannons on their ship to aim at the watching world.
I open and look out the hotel window. I like to see. And I do forget that I’m in work, I stop for a moment, just stand there. Staring. It’s as if past events become present in that moment, like dust particles that we can see in the air only when the bright sunlight streams into the room.
With my imagination I have summoned the ship in my song, and placed myself on it. I imagine walking round and round the deck high up on top of the bridge, looking out in the direction of the land behind the ship, and at the endless sea in front of it. The ship starts up its engines and heads back out to sea. I imagine the white foam as the ship cuts through the waves in the bright morning sunlight. And I know full well, that the ship, and all that it contains, is unimaginable.
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9. |
Willem van Liverpool
02:28
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[Single voice.]
Willem van Liverpool (William of Liverpool)
Ben ik, van Ierse bloed, (Am I, with Irish blood,)
Trouw aan mijn vrouw Delcie (True to my wife Delcie)
Blijf ik tot in den dood. (I remain until death.)
Een werelds man, (Man of the world am I,)
Een eerlijke echte vent ben ik, (And an honest lad too,)
Met mam, pa en opa (To Ma, Pa, and Grandad)
Ben ik nog altijd heel erg dik. (I have always given honour.)
[Single voice.]
Ik vertrouw alleen mezelf (I only rely on myself)
Vertel het niet aan Del. (But please do not tell Del.)
Betogingen in mijn naam (It pains me to see those who)
Is iets wat mij steeds kwelt. (Say they represent me.)
De politici zijn uit op. (Politicians crave glory.)
Eigen roem en geld. (They will feather their nests.)
De staat slaat nooit mijn (To these rulers I cannot)
Vertrouwen in mezelf uit het veld. (Ever give allegiance.)
[Crowd, simultaneously as previous verse.]
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe, (William of Nassau)
Ben ik, van Duitsen bloed; (Am I, of German descent;)
Den vaderland getrouwe (True to the fatherland)
Blijf ik tot in den dood. (I remain until death.)
Een Prinse van Oranje (Prince of Orange)
Ben ik, vrij onverveerd, (Am I, free and fearless,)
Den Koning van Hispanje (To the King of Spain)
Heb ik altijd geëerd. (I have always given honour.)
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10. |
In My Head
01:41
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I did some part time work, art workshops with adults. I did that for six months, thought I’d like more of that.
So I thought I’d come here, do three years, afterwards maybe do directing of my own art workshops.
I don’t paint as much as I would like. I need to use my time better now, it is all up to me.
I paint large so I need to get back from the wall. I share with three people, but they are never here.
I put back starting off for ever and ever, I need to start painting the ideas in my head.
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11. |
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Author’s route through France, ‘Railway Holiday in France’, places shown on the maps. Number one Cherbourg.
Number two Dol.
Number three Saint Marlo.
Number four Rennes.
Number five Redon.
Number six Savernay.
Number seven Nantes.
Number eight La Roche-sur-Yon.
Number nine La Rochelle.
Number ten Saintes.
Number eleven Bordeaux.
Number twelve Agen.
Number thirteen Montauban.
Number fourteen Toulouse.
Number fifteen Foix.
Number sixteen Latour-de-Carol.
Number seventeen Veilleneuve Vernaix
Number eighteen Perpignan.
Number nineteen Cerbére.
Number twenty Narbonne.
Number twenty-one Béziers.
Number twenty-two Séte.
Number twenty-three Montpellier.
Number twenty-four Pallavas.
Number twenty-five Nimes.
Number twenty-six Terrasson.
Number twenty-seven Avignon.
Number twenty-eight Le Teil.
Number twenty-nine Augy.
Number thirty Alise.
Number thirty-one La Bastide.
Number thirty-two Lonjayques.
Number thirty-three Clermont-Ferrand.
Number thirty-four Lamonde Dorres.
Number thirty-five Aiguillon.
Number thirty-six Userl.
Number thirty-seven Touille.
Number thirty-eight Uzerche.
Number thirty-nine Limoges.
Number forty Saint Sulpice Lorriére.
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12. |
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(FITZHERBERT)
I will cry unto | God with my | voice:
Even unto God I will cry with my voice, and he shall | hearken | unto | me.
In the time of my trouble I | sought the | Lord: I am so troubled | that I | cannot | speak.
I had some problems with my | talking | voice:
I couldn’t maintain any strength if I had a normal conversation, on the | phone | or in | person.
My voice would get incredibly tired, it would | fade | out:
There was a tiredness in my throat because I thought, I’m | tired, tired |
of talk | ing.
I honestly don’t remember a time I | did not | sing:
Another therapist pointed out that by singing you were determined that | people | heard your | voice.
She also said, “It’s interesting you | learnt | sign language: To work with the deaf, to | give | people | voice.”
(HOPKINS)
When the speech therapist asked me if I had a ‘persona’ | when I | sang:
That really hit home what I’d been thinking, that I feel more | real | there on | stage.
I felt the truth was: on stage it was | really | me:
And since the therapy that’s who I am all the time, now | I am | not pre | tending.
(SLOWLY FITZHERBERT)
I have considered the | days of | old:
And the | years | that are | past.
I call to re | membrance my | song:
And in the night I commune with my heart and | search | out my | spirits.
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Owd Scrat Records UK
Vinyl, CDs, cassettes and downloads from a dark corner of the land.
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