Shadows & Reflections: Bill Drummond

As many readers of Caught by the River will know, these darker months are the best months of the year to go fishing our rivers for that cruellest of fish – The Northern Pike.

To mark this coming season, Bill Drummond has written his letter to these darker months.

A CRAYFISH, A HERON, A PIKE

_{A study of Kray the Invasive Crayfish}

Sunday the 17^th of November 2024

Dear Winter of Our Discontent,

It was either suicide or form a blues band.

That was me, at this exact moment, on this very evening, 56 years ago.

As in the evening of Sunday the 17^th of November 1968. I was 15, and I had done none of my work for the next morning. I had done no homework all term. Life seemed meaningless, thus homework seemed pointless. And the days were getting shorter and darker. The discontent growing by the day.

Instead of even attempting to get that homework done, I was listening to the Mike Raven Blues Hour on BBC Radio 1. As I did every Sunday evening instead of doing my homework.

Mike Raven was my favourite Disc Jockey. His voice was dark, there were none of those hippy vibes like you got with John Peel. With Mike Raven you just got the dark facts. And the records he played were even darker. This was my music.

The Blues were calling me.

I had to form that blues band or die.

The only issue was, should I follow the Elmore James route to enlightenment, or the Muddy Waters path to down under? Elmore James was already dead, which made that route more appealing to my 15-year-old self, and I worshipped the sound of his slide guitar. Muddy Waters was still alive, and what made the Muddy Waters path more seductive was, his voice sounded like he had already been sent to hell, but somehow, he had escaped back to this world, to tell us the bad news.

When you are 15, good news does not exist. The badder the news the better.

The fact that I was a white teenager living in a place called Corby, with an inside toilet, hot and cold running water and even central heating in my bedroom, thus not the black grandchild of a slave, living in a freezing cold tenement in Chicago, did not seem to enter the equation of me forming a blues band or not.

The major issue for me was, none of my mates wanted to form a blues band, they just wanted to play Tamla Motown covers, to make people want to dance.

So…

I was going to have to go it alone as Big Bill Drummond (a knowing nod to Big Bill Broonzy (1903–1958)). Or maybe even Yer Wullie’s One Man Bucket Band (as a knowing nod to Oor Wullie (1936 tae noo)).

So…

I tuned my guitar to an open E, like Elmore James, and got a bottle neck and attempted to play that slide guitar, while faking the voice of Muddy Waters singing Mannish Boy.

But…

That was as far as it went. There were GCE ‘O’ Levels needing to be failed, and Northern Pike to be caught.

^{A profile portrait of The Midnight Heron}

The years slipped by and it was soon November 1974. I was 21 years old, working as a carpenter at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. We were having an after opening night party. The show being King Lear. The title role was being played by a Michael Gough. You may know him for his parts in a number of Hammer Horror films and as Alfred Pennyworth, the former rear gunner on a Lancaster Bomber and loyal butler in the mid period Batman movies.

But for me, this Michael Gough will always be that ‘I am a man, more sinning than sinned against’ misquote moment on the opening night of King Lear, where a Paul Jones was playing the young Edmund. This Paul Jones was the Paul Jones that had fronted Manfred Mann in the ’60s, and who the thinking girls had screamed at. But Paul Jones told me he did not want the screaming girls, thinking or not, because he wanted to sing the blues like Elmore James or Muddy Waters. We bonded over this, comparing and contrasting the rarest tracks from the Chess Records back catalogue.

And then someone handed me a guitar, and I struck an E chord, and Paul Jones pulled out his harmonica and started to sing Mannish Boy and Michael Gough joined in on the chorus.

Was this going to be it?

Was I finally going to form my blues band?

But there was a stage set for a Christmas show to be built, and there were lines to be learnt and not fluffed by the actors.

And…

Time moved on.

I might have formed a band in the May of 1977, still with my guitar tuned to an open E like Elmore James, but we did not play the blues. I mean Punk was calling. We were those darling buds of…

But…

In 1979, Paul Jones did form a blues band called The Blues Band. And the thinking girls no longer felt that urge to scream.

And…

Mike Raven no longer presented The Blues Show for BBC Radio 1, instead he acted in Hammer Horror films and became a shepherd.

And Paul Jones started to present The Blues Show on BBC Radio 2 but not until 1985.

And time moved on.

And in the November of 2021, when both Mike Raven and Michael Gough were dead, I was walking down the Lichfield Road in Birmingham towards Spaghetti Junction, where I was planning to be painting the head of a Pike on my wall. And I started to hear this voice in my head singing a blues song. And it was not the voice of Elmore James or Muddy Waters, or even the voice of Paul Jones. But it was my voice. And it was not just in my head, I was singing it out of my throat. And I looked around in case anyone might have heard. But there was no one there. I was alone on the Lichfield Road. The blues are always at their best when you are alone.

That night I got my guitar from where I hide it under my bed, and I wrote eleven blues songs, all of them set under Spaghetti Junction.

But I never formed that blues band. I mean, who needs blues bands in this day and age, other than a few old men that remember a time…

Last Tuesday I put whatever caution I might have left into a used brown paper bag. Screwed up the brown paper bag. And threw the screwed up brown paper bag in my bin. Then I got a bus to a broken farmhouse somewhere in the middle of a housing estate, somewhere in South London. And I picked up a guitar and played and sang two of those songs written back in November 2021. And someone called Gavin Bush recorded me singing and playing those two songs. Then last Thursday, I got a train to Glasgow and I asked Angie Darcey and Tam Dean Burn to replace my voice on this recording with their voices. This was done in a studio called La Chunky off Argyle Street in Glasgow. And I added some bass guitar to one song, and Murray Collier, the engineer, added some drums to that song. And this is the closest I have ever got in 56 years to forming that blues band. Your winter of our discontent can wait its turn. As can the other nine songs.

As for just now, it is minus three degrees on the streets outside of where I am about to be laying my head this night in Glasgow. But whatever temperature it is, wherever you are in this world, you can compare and contrast the versions done last Tuesday in South London with the versions done last Thursday in Glasgow.

Now it is time for me to go and dust my broom. And dream my dreams of forming a blues band in the November of 1968, one more time.

And…

Why should a Crayfish, a Heron, a Pike have life,

And thou no breath at all?

Yours,

Yer Wullie