The Lost World of David Devant Side One Liner notes


You are in a semi-trendy coffee shop come bar on Long Acre, WC2, on a fine day in May at some point during the turn of the century. You do that half getting up thing to shake the hand of the man who has just joined your company. He is boyishly handsome with a certain rugged traveller’s masculine quality. He reminds you of your best friend at school who had the same easy self-confidence, arising from good-looks and physical presence. This is Michael says Kevin the man who has invited you here today. Earlier Kevin told you that you would be joined by the son of Ronnie Biggs and so when you shake hands there is a mutual acknowledgement in the brief locking of eyes, that you are meeting the son of someone connected. Quite why the son of a great train robber is at your meeting is not something you can answer easily but somehow fits in with the felt intensity of being on the brink of something. It’s a feeling you often experienced during your time with Humbug Records. Humbug were a tiny label set up by Kevin (Crace) as a kind of surrogate El Records – a home to true oddball English/European eccentric genius pop. Kevin sent you a two and a half page paean to your theatrical pop combo after seeing you perform at the Borderline on Charing Cross Road. You still have it somewhere on its creamy inlaid paper inside a lever arch box file. These box files were once central to the band's identity as they collected the ephemera generated by each concert and every specifically themed performance.

 

Kevin is interested in putting together a compilation of the material you recorded for Humbug before you sat in a meeting with your management team and told him the band were going to accept the offer of joining Arista records. The head of the label had called your mother and told her he was going to make you famous after all. Not the same as a two and a half page letter but you later did get a very nutritious and inspiring letter from the other boss of the label. Sorry this is getting complicated and I’m not sure how relevant it is. You can still see that meeting in a tiny box room inside your head. Your management team holding all the cards and pretending that they had somehow got there through creative business genius rather than pure circumstance. Kevin had backed you when no one else was interested. He had funded the most extra-ordinairy video, constructed and shot in a huge rented office space at Le Roy house. This video, ironically, brought you to the attention of the head of Rhythm king records. Martin, a man guilty of bringing The killers to Britain and allegedly later dismissed from Arista for running a haulage firm off their books. Why is it always haulage firms? You didn’t form a theatrical pop combo of a camp Victorian bent with the intention of becoming bathed in the quasi-glamorous limelight shadows of the British underworld but this unsettling liminal realm seems apt. 

 

So, Kevin gets the cappuccinos and you discuss the release of the pre-Arista compilation. This kind of discussion about bringing a record together is a thrilling process. You are relieved that Kevin has agreed to meet you and you can let bygones be bygones. If you could go back, you think, you might sack half your management and tell them Kevin was now managing you as the band head to Arista. This certainly would have prevented some of the fundamental errors Arista made. Kevin keeping a shot gun above his desk and all that. It’s a replica isn’t it? Oh dear oh dear and it was all going so well Mr. Arista-shoddy-PR department. Between you, you decide to call it The Lost World Of David Devant and his Spirit Wife. That way you can use all the strange and half formed demoes and people will understand it’s like a forgotten trove of discarded material. Except that later this compilation of oddities will be the first thing that pops up on every single internet search for the band thus pulling the rug from underneath their quest for vaudevillian pop perfection in one fell click. This obliqueness is essentially the band though. Well an oblique, meandering approach leading to the heightened sense of meaning nestling in the middle of one of their performances.


Professor Kimey Peckpo conjuror and keynote speaker 


 1          Misc (Eringer Production)

 

Dave “the adjuster” (always seemed to have his hand down his jogging trousers) Eringer was brought in by Arista to mix some hit singles. This session, started at a rather swanky North London recording studio (???) resulted in the wonderful peak moment of The Colonel, who was laying down some BVs in the darkened performance room, taking on the persona of the mixing desk as some prospective clients were shown around the control room. “Hello I am the desk” says an unseen voice.        

 

2          Monkey's Birthday 

One of the first tracks demoed by the band in Brighton whilst they were still performing upstairs at The Rock in Kemptown. In many ways a classic of the English Edward Lear nursery rhyme pop/rock vernacular. The professor told the Vessel a Monkey’s birthday was a sunny day with spells of rain and this was the lightning seed of the song. Grew out of a barely formed guitar lick in C in the style of an imaginary Mersey-beat combo and morphed into the gargantuan rock landslide in the song’s second half. The sound of this session (including slumberland) has a cohesion not usually achieved in cheap rehearsal recording spaces.                       

 

3          One Track Mind 

A track that began life during the tour for the WLM album and resulted in the need for a Wurlitzer piano at every gig. Baz the guitar tech said it sounded like Elton john. This is a demo recorded at the Colonel’s place in West Hampstead and contains enough patina to sustain a lichen colony for all eternity. 

            

 

4          Pimlico 95

The first song on The Lost World to actually come from a recording session booked by Humbug records as preparation for an album. Grew out of a daft squelchy synth riff that the band rode till it lay shivering in a sweaty heap on the studio floor. In sheer joyful desperation the Vessel elected to sing the lyrics to Pimlico over the top and this led to the dreamy bridges in the shimmering haze of a Waterloo sunset. Recorded two years after the release of Pimlico it became known as Pimlico ‘95

 

5          Slumberland

From the same four-track Kemptown session as Monkey’s Birthday circa 1991/92 this song was integral to the performance of the levitation “illusion” in the middle of the sets upstairs at The Rock. The Iceman would levitate cocky young’un using a sheet placed artfully over some sticks with over-large brogue shoes on the end at the climax of the song “up up up up up up up up up up up powdooowow.”

 

6          Happy Accident

The demo that convinced Phil Manzanera to produce the band’s first album at the studios (the first to install protools with a team of young technical boffins) once owned by Godley and Cream. Alas for Roxy completists the band thought his cost was not the best value and went for Warne Livesy. Another early Devant classic exploring the wonders of serendipitous synchronicity. The band would rib and jibe each other about matters such as coincidence and the super natural, some members being more inclined than others to reach for the otherness of an intuitive realm. 

 

7          Gentle-Man Jim

Written and recorded during the hey day of brit-pop this song gambols in the bluebell scented fields adjascent to the more rigid looking crops of dad rock. Somehow this almost fell off any album coming in an inbetween time, the band decided to revisit it for Power Words for Better Living in a more upbeat form. It describes the ultimate inbetween outsider continuing the narrative voice first explored in Cookie.

 

8          Taking My Time

The demo for a song ear later marked to make the band enormous in America. It’s a four-track rehearsal studio demo from deepest East Brighton and captures a swampy majesty non of the band had expected to emerge. Major Talent (the bands auto-fictional manager) fell in love with this song and the recent rerecording was very much in his honour. Try saying “Tekin my time” without using a gravelly west coast whisper. 

 

9          Big Man

A highlight of the bands camp Victorian shows featuring an action man on the end of a very long bendy stick. Of course. This is recorded live at the Blue Note in Hoxton square when the only people who went to Hoxton Square were jazzers scurrying to avoid all the unseen potential spooks and muggers. Clearly the song is some sort of paean to small man complex but it explores this in a somewhat elliptical fashion. The rhyme of girth and mirth being a particularly low point in the song’s attempts to explore the potential transcendence of bottom feeding. 

 

10        Light On The Surface

Another track recorded for the Humbug album pre-production. There is a definite flavour of tongue in cheek prog “significance” inspired by the hours spent listening to Van der Graaf Generator with Jet boy in the basement studio on Bloomsbury’s Great Russell Street WC1. The song would later become the vaguest of vague outlines for the plot of the Bands television-programme-length film “Light on the Surface”. The lyrics are the Vessel trying to work it all out, via a passing acquaintance with the occupants of Plato’s Cave but as always the band carry us into the cinematic colour of the world beyond.

 

11        Giant

A live favourite from the early shows upstairs at The Rock in Brighton’s Kemptown district. The band would perform up a giant step-ladder thus illustrating their internal hierarchy. They would introduce the song by proclaiming themselves to be the first ever group to perform vertically (hello Norris McWhirter!). This version was recorded at the Colonel’s West Hampstead penthouse quintessential classic affordable West London flat using Cubase and a tape-recorder borrowed from the local scout troupe.

 

12        My Magic Life

Recorded as the b Side to Pimlico at Matrix studios behind great Russell Street WC1. Engineered by Ben who was a charming principal-boy come chaperone, guiding the band through their first ever proper recording studio session. Again aspirations of prog immersive psychedelic wonder surface in the multi layered “wooohs” in the outro. Time spent trying to record the perfect , Larry Grayson inspired “shut that door”, with all the band having a go until the vessel finally plumped for his Monster Mash delivery, proved to almost be the undoing of the entire sessions financial integrity.

 

13        The End Is Nice

A deceptively simple or artfully complex paean to words and their role in the coming apocalypse. This is recorded at one of the cheaper rehearsal studios (complete with bass intermittent-dizer) in Brighton somewhere near the Zap Club. The song’s mention of Oxford Street is in part a reference to the purveyor of Eight Passion Protein pamphlets, Stanley Green, who would sell said pamphlets outside Shelley’s shoeshop, on the corner of Oxford Street and Regents Street. His was a self-proclamatory aesthetic of auto-fictioning that the band has carried throughout their career.

Although the band now agree this recording came from a session at Josh Dean's James Street studios Foz Question Mark initially added "The End is Nice recording was made in the darkroom of pre-computer design company 'Pen and Ink' in Shipwright's Yard off Ship Street. I worked in the upstairs offices with the Prof's wife. We used to rehearse in the dark room as it was sound-proofed and very large. The studio also had large white walls, so we took many of our first publicity photos there. The 'magic wands' seen in the below photo are black rubylith tubes (red sticky back film for making silk screen masks) with pieces of A4 photocopy paper cow-gummed to the ends. The building is now the office of Skint Records, our music must have infused it's walls." 





14        Twenty One

 

Back to the Colonel’s Penthouse secret underground recording studio, this song began life as a demo for some lyrics sent to the Vessel by Boogaloo Stu: “please Mr Barber fix my hair up nice”. The Vessel, who has/had only ever written lyrics whilst in a trance elected to rise to the Colonel’s challenge of writing something about a real life incident. In this case a naked lady presenting herself in his bed on the occasion of his twenty first birthday. Whilst this technique appears to have worked in creating an engaging, joy through the tears, pop song The Vessel has since reverted to his ritualistic trance methodology. 

            

 

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