I’ve told this story before but in the early days of Facelift, probably late 1989 or early 1990 I was in regular correspondence with Hugh Hopper who did his utmost to try and support the fanzine in its infancy. This started initially with a pseudo-grumpy postcard asking why he hadn’t had a copy (the fanzine after all bore the name of one of his more celebrated compositions). One of the earliest letters I received from him included a typed list of around 30 odd addresses of ‘people I should contact’, a fairly heady mix of musicians (Richard Sinclair, Elton Dean, Phil Miller, Robert Wyatt, Pip Pyle); people whose names I knew the context of (Steve Lake, champion of Hugh’s work in the 70s in Melody Maker and Manfred Bress, editor of Canterbury Nachrichten, Facelift’s German sister); and a few names that I didn’t. One of the latter was Dave Radford, with the only clue being in the address: Canterbury Indoor Market etc etc.
I am ashamed to say that I didn’t follow a lot of these leads up, but eventually ended up in contact with most of them anyway. With Dave Radford it eventually, I think was because he stocked a few Facelift in his long-standing record shop. I certainly corresponded with him about his band Gizmo and plugged their 1992 album ‘They’re Peeling Onions In the Cellar’. Unknown to me at the time Hugh also ended up recording with Dave, gigging with him, and even helping out in his shop! All of this, plus the fact that Dave, as a teenager, had been part of a collective putting on gigs in Canterbury including many names familiar and beloved to readers of this blog, meant that speaking to Dave, a good friend of Hugh, was an absolute delight at the start of my research for the Hugh Hopper biography.
We started off by talking about a series of gigs Dave and associates put on in 1971 and ‘72 in a variety of venues in Canterbury “It was just a fluke thing”, Dave tells me modestly. “There were 6 of us started it up and called it Haxmady because we were talking in a shop and it was around Christmas. Somebody muddled up the words, Xmas etc and all the words that were there, and (we) got Haxmady out of it. It was my wife Chris, Geoff Brewster, Rose Cook and Dave Brettingham, and (the late) Phil Martin who was a local guy who later became a roving hurdy gurdy man!”
Dave is currently posting pictures on Facebook on a daily basis of posters of the Haxmady concerts, which included appearances from Egg, Delivery, Kevin Ayers, Matching Mole and Soft Machine as well as many others from early Seventies alternative music culture, usually with backing from local Canterbury bands.
Most gigs were at St Thomas’ Hall on Burgate, a working Catholic church hall “in the end, the caretaker was just fed up with finding bucket fulls of roaches! Which was fair enough, I suppose!” but even in full swing it was not without its limitations “there was a hell of a staircase to the back of the stage which was awful, which all the gear had to come up”. Attendances varied but rarely exceeded 250.
Some of the impetus for the series of gigs appeared to have come from The Great Medicine Ball, a local festival the previous year. “It went from America over to Europe all being filmed by Warner Brothers and ended up at Bishopbourne. It was a free festival and was very hippy but I don’t think the film ever came out. We went there, there were 200 people and it was Rod Stewart and the Faces, I think Daddy Longlegs, Pink Floyd, I think Mott The Hoople played, and there were other people. I think Richard Chamberlain was definitely there, sitting right in front of us! And it was brilliant! All free but hardly anyone went.“
Stoneground had also appeared at the Medicine Ball and were another later Haxmady promotion, this time up at the University. “We did a couple up at the uni, because I knew the social secretary there, John, from Beckenham”. One memorable near miss was David Bowie “Phil got a job in an agency and got a lot of private numbers, including McCartney and Bowie. And he phoned Bowie to have him at St Thomas’. At first he was a bit offish, and then once he had sorted himself out and realised that Phil was harmless he couldn’t get him off the phone! And we got him for £200 but he needed a grand piano! And we couldn’t get a grand piano up those stairs. So I approached John at the university and he was well into it, because he came from London anyway and he knew all about how well he was doing. And he put it to the Students’ Union and none of them wanted him to play there. Because he was a ‘has been!’ It coincided with Ziggy Stardust! It’s madness! But there was no way we could have done it at St Thomas’. So we just gave up on it!”
Other venues were the Marlowe Theatre and also the Westgate Hall. “We also did Stackridge, they did a Christmas type pantomime thing that sold out right throughout the country and we did it at Herne Bay with a very small audience but it was sold out everywhere else”. Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come on the other hand played three times, “It was fantastic, and (he was) one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. He’s just lovely. Kingdom Come – we took them on at St Thomas’ Hall twice and once at Drill Hall, which was falling down, and the police tried stopping it because of the volume” (rather than as a fire hazard, as I suggested to Dave). “I don’t know if you know the Kingdom Come stuff. You know the bit “This is the gig to end all gigs, this is the night of the pigs!” – they put that in just as the police came in, which was brilliant! And I tell you who were playing with them as support – the Supersister band. They were very good.
Gigs even decamped briefly further afield. “We tried doing a few in Edinburgh Cathedral. The first one we did was John Martyn and Al Stewart. John Martyn – what a guy – so nice. He came up from Hastings on a train with an AC30, his guitar and Al Stewart flew in from Amsterdam, went to his hotel and got a taxi! So different, the two of them. I remember that gig, John Martyn being fantastic. And then we put another one on, we put Third Ear Band on, but it fell through, one of them was ill, I believe, and we put Quicksand on instead which was a bit Floydy, and I did a folky support with it, which was a bit nervewracking. I mean the first time we went to Edinburgh, we went in Dave Brettingham’s car, the second time we caught the bus up or vice versa.
“We didn’t even have a PA, we just went into the nearest music shop to see if they had one. Mad! The other reason (was that) it was like a try out – I got near enough to putting on Quintessence in Canterbury cathedral. Alan Wicks was the cathedral organist and music person at the time and I used to meet up with him. It was all fine and they were getting quite into it. Quintessence did one smaller cathedral somewhere and the writeups in the Melody Maker or whatever said about the smell of incense in the air and overnight they just didn’t want to know! “
Eventually the operation ground to a halt because of funds “it sort of fell apart because it’s very hard to get an audience. Soft Machine did quite well, that was when I first met Hugh. I’ve got the figures written down somewhere – you wouldn’t believe how few people went! I think everyone lost in the end. Dave Brettingham, he worked in a factory and I think he ended up paying quite a few of them because he was the only one earning reasonable money.”
Having been a teenager in Canterbury Dave was lucky enough to have caught Caravan in their very early days “I literally saw the first Caravan gigs, there was one at Westgate Hall for the art college and I would have been really young, and it must have been one of the first gigs they did. It was with Coloured Raisins, who were a soul band, which shows you how long ago it was, because there were a lot of soul bands around at the end of the Sixties. I also, I don’t know if that was the same gig but I had a giant poster which I gave to some friends who went to America, there were only 4 or 5 of them in the whole of Canterbury. designed by Kitch who I believe was Dave Arbus’s brother from East of Eden. It was a like a big black and white like Audrey Beardsley type of poster. I gave it away – idiot! “
Dave was also, even back then, a musician, later most associated with Gizmo, a band who recorded 5 albums between the late Seventies and 2015. But its genesis was much earlier “We were around even then. Things spark off other things. Martin Judd, the bass player (of Gizmo) was in Porcelain Frogg but I had a band with Dave Smith the drummer, Martin Judd, and Nigel Blow – which was Warlock. Now ‘Warlock’ (the track) was on ’If I Could Do It All Over Again’. And ‘Nigel Blows a Tune’ is on ‘In The Land And Grey and Pink’, and Nigel was the keyboard player with us! Someone (recently posted) on the Canterbury scene Facebook group about Nigel Blow, Dave Sinclair’s cousin who wrote the riff on that tune, and I was thinking about this tape that I’ve got of us doing that riff on and on it goes, which would be me, Martin Judd, Nigel Blow and Dave Smith on drums!”. On the 1992 album ‘They’re Peeling Onions in the Cellar’, the album started with a funky, guitar-heavy version of Caravan’s ‘Policeman’. “Richard (Sinclair) liked that a lot. He said he’d come up on stage and do it with me, but it never happened.”
Dave’s relationship with Hugh Hopper continued at the end of the Seventies when Hugh gave up music for a few years and amongst other things became a taxi driver in Canterbury. He became a frequent visitor to Dave’s record shop in the Indoor Market, as did other Canterbury luminaries. “Richard (Sinclair) used to come in a heck of a lot – he would be in every day! Do you know he’s a really good carpenter? I know a couple of people who he fitted kitchens for. The shop was a few doors away from Richard Coughlan’s pub, which was the Cricketers. Pye I knew very well, in fact going back completely years because I used to live up the hill near the university, and Pye used to live up there. And I knew Geoff of course”.
Dave told me a bit more about the shop – he ran it for three decades from 1982 until he was given three weeks notice to up sticks. “With the record store I used to sell things as cheap as possible, and fast… For thirty years. The stuff I had through my hands you wouldn’t believe!
It wasn’t middle of the road – it was all rock or punk. I mean I like The Cure and stuff like that. I like Nick Drake, John Martyn, Beatles. If you hear something new which is very unlikely. I just like what I like.” Dave told me about a number of artefacts he’d kept including original reel to reels of Hugh’s ‘1984’, a 7” promo of ‘Place of My Own”, a copy of the original recordings for the Richard Sinclair/Hugh Hopper project which ended up being released in the Nineties as ‘Somewhere in France’ and a scrapbook containing all of the posters and photos of both the Haxmady gigs and a later set of gigs in the Nineties when he put on Gong and Tim Blake.
But back to Hugh:
“I remember him telling me about Whitney Houston doing ‘Memories’. And he was really upset she didn’t put it on the album because it would have seen him all right moneywise! And do you know within a few weeks I got hold of the French version of the 12” single which I gave him. But isn’t that weird, I wouldn’t have even known…”
Hugh also gigged with the band briefly. There will be more in the book about Hugh’s later involvement with Gizmo (he appeared on a Van Der Graaf Generator tribute CD called Eyewitness performing Gizmo’s cover of ‘House with No Door’ which also later appeared as a bonus track on the CD release of the ‘Gizmo’ album and still available at http://www.gizmo.uk.com/buy-online.html, Our conversation didn’t talk about Gizmo as much but interested readers should check out the extensive Gimzo archive at http://www.gizmo.uk.com/history.html, which includes a biography and full details of how to get copies of the 4 available albums.
Instead Dave left us a nice story about Hugh helping out in his shop in the Noughties:
“Somebody on the Canterbury scene Facebook group said that he went into the shop to buy a Hugh Hopper CD and Hugh was behind the counter! And he said, “I was so embarrassed I couldn’t buy it!”. I wonder if he bought something else instead or just walked out. But another thing I remember very well. He’d been to Europe and then he went to Japan afterwards and I thought he was back from Japan. Two boys and a man came into the shop, I think the wife might have been outside and they were huge Soft Machine and Floyd freaks, the father and son in particular. I think the other boy was a friend and he was on holiday from Belgium with them. And I used to have quite a lot of Canterbury CDs and they were pulling out the Hugh stuff and they were saying, ‘oh we saw him in Belgium blah blah blah’. And they said, ‘we’d like to buy these’. And I thought, I wonder if he’s back from Japan? And he was actually half way between Tankerton and Chartham, where the studio was. And I said, ‘There’s a few people here, is there any chance of signing a few CDs they’re buying?’ And, he said, ‘yes I’ll come via Canterbury’, and he parked his bike outside and he came in and got the father and the son and the son’s friend, and they were almost speechless. He signed their stuff and had a chat with him and went over to the studio. The son came back in the evening, he must have spent the day in Canterbury, and he said, ‘thank you for that, that has absolutely made my father’s holiday’. And they went on to try and find Syd Barrett, or his haunts.”
Thanks to Dave Radford for being such a willing and open interviewee. Check out the gizmo website at http://www.gizmo.uk.com/history.html
Purchase copies of the ‘Gizmo’ album featuring Hugh Hopper (and other albums) at http://www.gizmo.uk.com/buy-online.html
Thanks also to Hans Voigt for the photos from his visit to Canterbury in September 1999
Follow the progress of the Hugh Hopper biography by joining the Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1928474387265516/
The Canterbury scene(zine) continued.... 