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I say, what have we here? The nucleus of East of Eden. We met up
with guitarist Geoff Nicholson and sax player Ron Caines in London (and
big thanks to Ron for coming up from Brighton) where we found out more
about the history of the band and the scene of the time, what happened and
the effect of THAT single. Over to you chaps....
East of Eden, Friars Aylesbury, 1969.
photo - East of Eden
Just to
start and to clear up as this sort of thing always intrigues and
fascinates me, the local newspaper advert references to 'The Mad Arbus'
were of course to his style rather than anything else! (This was Dave
Arbus, violinist in the band)
He had great stage presence
from his drama background. Because he used a pickup on the violin he could
move around a lot using exaggerated elbow movements and all kinds of
histrionics.
As I
mentioned before to you, I am interested in the band's history, you all
started in Bristol didn't you?
I met Dave at Bristol when he
was doing a post graduate year and he came to see me play in a jazz club
and said he'd like to play with me. We were then in jazz quintet with guys
from Bristol University and did a gig for BBC's Late Night Line Up in
1967. I realised we couldn’t make a living at this. Then I met Geoff in a
trio with sax and trumpet doing soul stuff like Midnight Hour. Dave though
had never heard any rock music. He'd been teaching English as a foreign
language for a year in Saudi Arabia, came home with a load of money and
had a large collection of jazz LPs. So we formed a band round Geoff, Dave
and myself doing covers initially, things like My Girl, basic soul stuff
and John Mayall songs, then we all started listening to Hendrix and
Cream...this was all new to Dave Arbus! Dave went to Paris and saw
Jean-Luc Ponty play the violin with a pick-up on it and he realised he
could put one on his. He was a brilliant musician and I saw him play
Bartok in a university string quartet. So we brought the violin in and
still had trumpet and sax.
But at that time I didn’t want
to go down the blues route, I saw us more influenced by West Coast music
or saw us going down the road of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. We
also thought we should write our own stuff so I penned a few songs and we
started gigging in a reggae club in Bristol. We became influenced by the
likes of the Ska-talites but doing ska without the back beat in a
different way which evolved into our own kind of material.
So you
were influenced by a wide range of artists and genres really when you
include the likes of the Ska-talites....
I heard a couple of
compositions by the great Don Drummond in the reggae club, bought the
record and that became a staple part of our repertoire. Also, we went on
the road having got a record deal and a manager....in a time when managers
came and went. We were originally called The Electric Light Orchestra
before there was an ELO...
I never knew that! That's
incredible....
We were called that because of
the violin in the band then we had a gig in Bristol at the Theatre Royal
and the director at the theatre suggested we changed our name and came up
with The Picture of Dorian Gray, from the Oscar Wilde novel. So we went
with that, but wanted to change it again. I don't really know how we
became East of Eden but I didn't really like the name.
I don't think that's a bad name at
all.
On our first album, Mercator
Projected, which was our attempt at a concept album. The producer's idea
was to put this projection of a world map over a woman on the album cover.
On the second album Situation Normal All Fucked Up (SNAFU), it was our
idea to have the woman playing the violin on the cover photo. The cover on
the French release was a Ford Transit in a bottle rather than a ship in
the bottle. This was an idea of ours to reflect life on the road all over
Europe.
This is
what fascinates me, hearing what was going on in that scene in the early
days of Friars and the realities of hard endless gigging...
We did a gig in the Hook of
Holland on the back of the King of Siam single...for one gig we got paid
£50 which in context was a month's wages for me as an art teacher at the
time. We thought this was good, so we flew back and realised that the £50
had to be divided five ways and the manager took his 30%, so we were’t
going to make any money.
Later on when we were doing a
gig in Hull, some guy came into the dressing room with a violin and
started playing an Irish jig and Dave said 'what's that?' - so when we got
back to London, Dave found the music to these Irish jigs and the next day,
Dave was doing three ji*gs on stage but it was a footnote to the show right
at the end. So without knowing it, as Dave Arbus says, we invented Celtic
Rock! Who's that guy in The Chieftains?
Paddy Maloney?
When the single came he called
the rest of The Chieftains, and said they had to go professional! John
Peel dropped us when that came out. We were doing well in France getting
£800 a gig at a festival and then coming back to England and doing £45
gigs. But how Jig a Jig came about, was we were in France and a girl from
Decca said we needed to get a single out and she suggested Jig a Jig so we
went into the studio and recorded it. When it was released, it actually
bombed because it turned out Decca hadn't supported it.
So you really weren't a priority to
them?
No. We had a contract but our
manager had no experience of managing in the music business. There was a
recent documentary about him and he turned out to be Hattie Jacques' live
in boyfriend. He didn't have a cutting edge which was a bone of
contention. In terms of playing the trendy places like Middle Earth and
such like, we were never part of that élite because we were from Bristol.
Geoff: (finally
getting a word in!) The first London gig we ever did was at The
Roundhouse....
Yes, we had been booked for
some benefit there. The big managers who controlled the scene were the
likes of Robert Stigwood or Don Arden.We never did America,because you had
to pay so much up front to get on a tour, although Bill Graham saw us in
Paris, and said he’d like us to play Fillmore East.
I find
the practice of 'buy on' downright offensive. Bands like yourselves never
stood a chance.
And some who did go over ended
up playing really small clubs and nobody ever gets to hear about them. It
was like Spinal Tap when we were in Europe though. We did a Swiss tour and
got invited to the Indian embassy for dinner after they'd seen us play.
But
around that time of the end of the sixties, having a band with a violin in
was fairly unique...
Well there was Family....
And High Tide, that was about it.
Dave Arbus really looked the
part though with the long black jacket, knee high boots, hat and scarf. He
really was an actor. Looking back on it we looked like French
impressionists - I looked like Gaugin, he looked like Pissarro. It was
like something out of a spaghetti western. We were quite theatrical
really, running into the audience playing our instruments up and down the
aisles On one occasion I dragged someone on stage who blew into my sax
whilst I pressed the notes and then we would pick it up and fall back into
our routine. The critics of the time said we were like Dada. But we were
also improvising more and more.
You were a sort of freeform band
weren't you, at least then?
Yes, but in a pop group
context- not supported by Arts Council grants. We were seen as avant garde
with the likes of Archie Shepp on the free jazz scene in Paris. But on
getting back to England, Radio One wasn't playing us because we weren't on
the the playlist. But as I said when Jig a Jig was released, it died a
death. But about a year later, Decca hired some young guy called Jonathan
King (yes that one) to review the back catalogues and he pulled out Jig a
Jig and they released it as a novelty song and this time it was a big hit
and got on the playlists. We had left the band by this time and they
changed their musical direction. The original vision was lost.
I know
that after you and Geoff left the band, whilst the musicians were good,
you felt it had strayed away from what you had set out to achieve
musically didn't you?
Yes, but they were still doing
some of our old material! Dave Arbus left as well - he'd gone by 1972.
Didn't Dave play the violin break on
The Who's Baba O'Riley?
Yes, that relationship sort of
started when Keith Moon sat in on one of our gigs playing congas when we
were supporting the Bonzos at the Lyceum. Dave turned down Manfred Mann
who offered him good money, although Steve York had already joined him.
We found Steve
York when he was with the Graham Bond Organisation
I think he played Friars with Vinegar
Joe.
I still talk to
Steve, he's living in Mexico now.
He played on Marianne
Faithfull's Broken English album and moved to the States. He was only
about 19 when he joined us.
One
of things we did discuss earlier and I think you lament (rightly) is that
when people think of the rock scene from that time (in whatever form),
East of Eden is not the first band to come to mind, they will easily
identify other bands which is a pity....
But this was 40 years ago and
I guess you're looking back down the telescope called hindsight.
It is
true of so many bands, that you had that hit single that wasn't
necessarily representative of what you actually did - so it probably
became the proverbial albatross round you.....
The audiences
didn't know what to expect.
So many
people would have been going to East of Eden gigs at the time expecting
more stuff like Jig a Jig...
We had built up
an audience, around this time we had been doing about 200+ gigs a year all
over the UK and Europe.
But
playing 200+ gigs a year, there must have been a hardcore who would have
known to expect....
But you had to have radio to
reach an audience and we didn't get played. And also by being written
about. I think about all we had was a column written about us by Richard
Williams (Melody Maker) but we never got a front page or anything like
that. We never got promoted.
Our breakthrough in France was
the Amougies festival with Beefheart and Zappa. It was a three day
event.....
It was filmed and
ended up in cinemas...known as the French Woodstock apparently. It was a
pretty bad film but we were in it.
That festival ended up being
in Belgium as the authorities wouldn't allow it to take place in the end
and it took place in a tent in a village.
The whole film must exist somewhere but bits of it are on YouTube.
We've searched
high and low.
I believe that was actually
the first rock festival in Europe. We also did a lot of television and
radio in France. Paris based BYG records, who had Don Cherry, Chick Corea
etc, offered us £50,000 to sign, but we were already signed to Deram.
BYG Records did
go bankrupt six months later.
Yes, but signing to them might
have given us funds to live in France.
After
you left East of Eden, I know Geoff you have aside from gigging been an
illustrator and Ron you have gigged and returned to your art, but I know
when we first spoke about Friars about four years ago, a full [modern day]
reunion was on the cards, but went slightly belly up, what happened?
It actually
started off about 20 years ago when we all met up again for the first time
and we recorded three albums, it was Dave, Ron and myself with a couple of
extra musicians. But just over a year ago somebody approached Dave Arbus
to get East of Eden back up and running to do a European tour. Dave was
fairly keen as it was a lucrative offer, but it took so long to organise,
we realised it wasn't such a good idea. Dave, basically, pulled out at the
last minute and we weren't prepared to take the risk. It was all a bit
scary and we would have had to be on a tour bus.
Geoff Britton, the original
drummer was on board and we did some rehearsals my place, the four of us,
and it was pretty good.
We thought there
was still some sparkle there! Geoff lives in Spain and occasionally comes
over and I have played with him at some blues jams.
Geoff went on to play with
Wings after East of Eden. He played on the Speed of Sound album. As Geoff
tells it he was asked to go to an audition and he was watching some of the
other auditions, drummers he admired, but he got the gig over the cream of
London session musicians. Paul McCartney realised he was that good. He was
fit strong bloke, full of energy on stage.
I gig all the
time in blues bands and Ron plays lots of jazz. Dave recently published a
book of line drawings of French Chateaux.
He nowadays plays Stephane
Grapelli type of music I believe.
In
short, the proposed tour seemed like a good idea at the time but wasn't to
be....
It was just six gigs in Europe
-Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and a couple in Germany, but the promoter didn't
fill us with confidence as he wasn't very experienced. He’d seen Dave
Arbus' website and that's how the contact was made, no-one got in touch
with us. When Dave contacted us about the promoter's offer, it was the
first time he had shown any interest in reuniting.
The record
company that re-released Mercator and Snafu was run by a guy who was
Caravan's manager. He said he could get us some gigs but then Dave didn't
seem to be interested. The last time I spoke to Dave, he thought me might
be going to live in Morocco.
We could get you
three original members (myself, Ron and Geoff Britton) if you really want
to get a version of East of Eden back in Aylesbury! I know a suitable
violinist and bass player.
I suppose we could go out as
Beast of Sweden with a guest violinist. Or even East of Neasden!
Gentlemen, thank you so much for talking to us and best wishes from all at
Friars Aylesbury.
Thank you very much.
This interview and its
content are © 2012 Mike O'Connor/www.aylesburyfriars.co.uk and may not
be used in whole or in part without permission.
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