Brand X, a History
Brand X: the origin story in broad strokes, twists and turns, in a chronology of paramount importance.
The British band Brand X had a lifespan of 46 years, and existed on and off between 1975 and 2019, though technically, their last studio creation as Brand X dates back to 1997. At the height of their success, the 1970s, they were often considered a Jazz-Fusion act, but over time, were rounded up into the “progressive” music label, this due in part to their own gradual shapeshifting. The fact that upwards of 25 separate and international session players appeared with them in studio or on stage, their frequent reputation of working as a revolving door musical experiment was erroneous insofar as Brand X were only ever three British musicians who signed on and were defined as “the band”. They were: John Goodsall, Percy Jones, and Robin Lumley.
This is their story, as retold by acolytes and front row seat participants Robin St. John Lumley, Percy Jones, Jack Lancaster, Danny Wilding & Pete Bonas:
Brand X was born and most certainly christened in London, in the summer of 1975, a year after a lineup of young musicians had convened at Island Records, in St. Peter’s Square, Hammersmith.
Guitarist Pete Bonas, drummer John Dillon, along with percussionist and singer Phil Spinelli and guitarist John Goodsall (of Atomic Rooster) had been jamming in Chris Blackwell’s Island Records recording studio, at the pleasure of A&R man Richard Williams; their band lacked a bass and keyboard player.
Across town, a few miles away, in Clapham, at South London’s PSL studios, keyboardist Robin Lumley, formerly of David Bowie’s The Spiders from Mars, was playing in the jam band “Karass” (a name derived from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle) which convened weekly for Wednesday night jams. The band also featured Saxophonist Jack Lancaster of Blodwyn Pig, occasional drummer Ric Parnell of Atomic Rooster – friend of John Goodsall’s, King Crimson’s Keith Tippett, and Julie Driscoll, his wife, who sang vocals. On occasion, they were joined by Chris Wood of Traffic, Clive Bunker and Ritchie Dharma (of the Mick Abrahams band). Robin, for his part had invited his roommate, bassist Percy Jones of Liverpool Scene, to play along. Also present at those sessions was Paul “Sheds” Jackson, a young, all-purpose engineer.
Though opinions may diverge on the way guitar prodigy John Goodsall and Pete Bonas came to play with Percy and Robin, it is thought that Sheds who also assisted with sessions at Island Records may have brought them together; John Goodsall and Pete Bonas invited Percy Jones and Robin Lumley to Island Records. These collaborations were amorphous in nature and there was no noticeable territoriality… Robin now recalls the tube ride back to Clapham and Percy exclaiming, “that guitarist with the curly hair has some serious chops!”
One evening in 1974, Sheds had arranged for Island’s A&R man Richard Williams to audition the band with Robin Lumley and Percy Jones in session; impressed with the resulting chemistry, Williams offered the them an opportunity to casually join the jams at Island with the sitting band, Goodsall, Bonas, Dillon, and Spinelli. The yet unnamed six-piece ‘Island band’ would play a repertoire at times reminiscent of “Average White Band”; a “below Average White band” as Percy, John and Robin later joked… They met several times a week to play together at Island’s Basing Street studios.
Unusually, the band would soon receive a salary from Island Records, and would increasingly require managing, so Richard Williams assigned his new hire, A&R Danny Wilding, to the sessions and general oversight. The band would remark, to their astonishment, about how well they were treated by their management, in those early days…
Influenced by the electronic jazz of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Chick Corea, The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Tony Williams, Goodsall, Lumley and Jones were closest in style and eager to tackle more sophisticated and experimental music. When drummer John Dillon suffered a breakdown or sorts, and took a leave, the band asked Danny Wilding if he could help them locate a more adventurous drummer. Island Records considered the band ‘fluid’ and was eagerly looking to form a permanent lineup. Wilding ended up recruiting Genesis drummer Phil Collins who joined the sessions, after another star drummer, Bill Bruford of King Crimson, turned down the gig, citing his busy schedule. Danny Wilding recalls that he piqued Collins’ interest by touting: “Wait until you get a load of the bass player!”
Collins had become uncertain about his future in Genesis since Peter Gabriel had just left their band when their “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” tour concluded in the spring of 1975.
Since the “Island band” lacked a name, the generic mention “Brand X” was coined by Danny Wilding (credit is sometimes offhandedly given to his boss Richard Williams, but it is Wilding indeed who largely came up with the name, with merely a nudge coming from Williams.) That name stuck.
Danny Wilding reflects that Island Records was looking to groom a band from the ground up, and, in the late spring of 1975, Wilding who by then had the six-piece band under contract, directed them to prepare to record their first effort, at Island’s Basing street studios, one which featured two guitars and lead vocals by Spinelli. But John Goodsall, Percy Jones, Phil Collins and Robin Lumley were generally nonplussed with the sound of the six-piece band; Lumley, who would later be decried as the mutiny’s instigator, convinced the four to quietly sneak off to a rehearsal room in West London’s Acton district (a rehearsal room above a girl’s school where Genesis had often rehearsed in the past, and where Phil Collins’s mother taught) and spent a day checking each other out as a four-piece. The jams from that day which were recorded on cassette tapes were the root of the material that would wind up on Unorthodox Behaviour a few months later. The sparks flew at once, and the four convened a meeting with Richard Williams and Island’s top dog, Chris Blackwell, and requested permission to record a new album as only a four-piece, but their request was met with predictable resistance from Bonas and Spinelli. John Goodsall, whose initial affiliation was with Bonas and Spinelli, was sensing the inevitable power shift underfoot and “defected” to the Collins, Jones and Lumley camp. The Island session band project had hit an impasse…
For years, this idea was floated that Brand X was "Phil's [Collins] little band"... The magazines of the time didn't help: no one seemed to know that only John, Percy, and Robin were signed into Brand X, and took-on the band's debt; Phil was 'hired-out' through his own company, and everyone else was also a hire.
Phil Collins, the most powerful and notorious among the band’s performers, held a trump card: Hit & Run Music manager Tony Smith, who had recently begun to manage Genesis, had seemingly expressed the will to “buy-out the four-piece from Island Records”, in an effort to placate Collins, thus sealing the fate of Brand X. Chris Blackwell and Richard Williams, well aware that their experimental session band had already run a hefty tab, agreed to give-up the musicians, and expected in return, from Hit & Run management, that their “investment” would be repaid. That expectation would much later balloon into a lawsuit settled out of court by Hit & Run, in favor of Island Records, but would also quietly contribute to the band’s tab. John Goodsall, Robin Lumley and Percy Jones, years later, crushed with the weight of an untold debt would face poverty for decades as Brand X albums went on selling all over the world. Tony Smith who managed Brand X through Hit & Run had privately decided at the onset that Phil Collins would remain ‘hired out’ through Phil’s own corporation (Phil Collins Ltd.), and despite erroneous ideas in the Press, then, up to the present describing the band as “Phil’s other group”, and “Phil’s little band”, the physical person of Phil Collins didn’t actually join into the partnership deal of Brand X, on paper, or the development costs of the band, and was shielded from liability… While all subsequent guest performers who entered and exited Brand X at will would regularly collect royalties on any credited co-writing, and receive a salary for time served, often undisclosed, (at times four to five times higher than the founders, even in later years), Percy’s, John’s and Robin’s earnings were to be a mere advance on their future debt, one that, to this day, they remain on the hook for.
Setting aside the finer legal points of people’s contractual investment into Brand X and their subsequent exposure, the remaining matter of how they viewed their emotional roles is revealing: Phil Collins, in hindsight, reflected that he saw “Genesis as the wife, and Brand X as the mistress with the big [@#*!]”.
It’s safe to say that Goodall, Jones and Lumley weren’t casual at all about their commitment to the band, which was their whole lives, warts and all.
Brand X was thus, at the behest of Phil Collins, signed to Charisma Records, via Hit & Run who holds, to this day, nearly all their publishing rights, as “principals” John Goodsall, Percy Jones and Robin Lumley.
In the fall of 1975, Brand X recorded Unorthodox Behaviour. By acquiring the band, Smith would deepen his relationship with all of Collins’s creative activities, further cementing the relationship he had entered-in with Charisma Records, a company over which he had considerable control following the rising success of Genesis, with Phil Collins by then poised to become its lead singer.
Robin Lumley and cohort saxophonist Jack Lancaster had already recorded Peter and The Wolf, as well as The Eddie Howell Gramophone Project (AKA The Man from Manhattan) at Trident Studios in the summer of 1975, and were very impressed with Dennis Mackay’s engineering skills. Thus, they opted for Unorthodox Behaviour to be recorded there.
An interesting side note has it that Danny Wilding brought a young Australian band to Island Records that same year. The band, then named Mississippi would later be known as Little River Band. But Richard Williams, nonplussed, passed them up, to Wilding’s lasting chagrin. Wilding quit Island Records soon after this and pursued his career as a flutist, occasionally joining Brand X in sessions.
In 1975, Charisma Records released the first Brand X album: Unorthodox Behaviour, to critical acclaim.
The Middle 1970s: Brand X’s prolific stint:
In subsequent years, and until the end of the decade, Brand X would release five other albums, often employing varying session personnel, but always with the core three musicians, Goodsall, Jones, and Lumley, at the heart of the compositions and, or, at the heart of the production of the albums, in the case of Lumley. It’s widely felt that John Goodsall, over a period of five years, would compose over 60% of the pieces released by Brand X, yet, the band’s most popular tunes were often collective compositions, like Nuclear Burn, and Why Should I Lend You Mine, When You’ve Broken Yours Off Already…? Other pieces composed by Lumley like Disco Suicide, or even Percy Jones’s classic Malaga Virgen are often cited as favorites by fans of Brand X. Aside from the considerable contributions by percussionist Morris Pert on the album Masques, Brand X was a democratic band whose compositions came down to Goodsall, Jones and Lumley.
These five albums were:
Moroccan Roll (1977), Livestock (1977), Masques (1978), Product (1979), Do They Hurt? (1981). In 1982, a “posthumous” Is There Anything About? was compiled by Robin Lumley from studio outtakes but was described as “mostly rubbish” by the band members, including Lumley himself, as he looks back on it for this history of Brand X.
In 1977, the album Livestock earned Brand X the Melody Maker poll award of “best live recording” prize.
Brand X once again enjoyed an unusual situation for a band with such little mainstream appeal, in that it existed inside of the luxurious bubble, and aura of Charisma Records and all its perks. The musicians were able to earn a living wage and have all their travels as well as recording and studio time paid for by the record company. Their every need was looked after, and Charisma spared no expense to shield the band from its own, often outrageous, sometimes destructive behavior, and even when it included footing the bill for expensive and protracted rehab treatment at the famed Champneys resort for John Goodsall’s severe (but functional) heroin addiction, and providing much needed cover stories to the Rock n’ Roll Press when required to explain away a musician’s absence (just another day in Rock n’ Roll).
Brand X also enjoyed the highly prized and dazzling album cover designs of Hipgnosis, a creative agency famous for coming up with album covers for Led Zeppelin, Genesis and Pink Floyd. This was largely the result of the notoriety of Phil Collins, who, despite being a formidable musician and a key contributor to the first two albums recorded by the band, would soon be too busy as the drummer and lead singer in Genesis to spare any time to record or tour with Brand X.
Brand X was characterized by a humorous and flippant (very British) tendency toward levity on and off stage. This resulted in part to the fact that most Fusion acts of the time had adopted ominous names and God-like presentations. Even the name, Brand X was meant to desacralize the experience altogether. The band would coin titles often inspired by the flippant and ever so popular Monty Python, and Robin Lumley’s lifelong friendship with Terry Jones and Michael Palin is directly to blame for some of the strangest liner notes to ever grace a Rock record…
Prior to recording their 1978 album Masques, Robin Lumley would be replaced by keyboard player Peter Robinson, in part, at least, because the Brand X collective, who often described itself as a ‘democratic arrangement’, was attempting to create a sound that could raise the band’s commercial appeal in the US, and rival some of their better-known peers: Weather Report, and Mahavishnu Orchestra. In subsequent months and years, the band would be subjected to increasing pressures to make commercial concessions, including adding vocals to their music once again.
Brand X played several festivals, including Reading, Knebworth, Isle of Whyte, La Fête de l’Humanité, and Montreux. In 1977, they toured the US while promoting their albums Moroccan Roll, then Livestock.
The following year, 1978, after John Goodsall developed a severe case of tendonitis, American session man Mike Miller, a friend of Peter Robinson’s, became the live show’s lead guitarist for a portion of a long tour of Europe and the US to which the band’s commitment had to be honored; John Goodsall who’d come along on the road with the band to monitor the comings and goings, and to keep an eye on the cash, eventually rejoined the band fully for a part of the US tour, but was not always willing to get on stage as crippling pain in his right hand added to anxieties he had about performing.
Performance problems seemed to settle, and the full concert lineup, minus a staple of Brand X’s live shows, Morris Pert, toured the UK and the US again, in 1979, with Phil Collins back on drums, after a two-year absence, and a returning Robin Lumley joining Peter Robinson in the studio and onstage, promoting their album Product, whose single “Don’t Make Waves”, composed by John Goodsall, and sung by Phil Collins made it to the UK and even US charts. The Product (and Do They Hurt?) recordings would be Phil Collins’s swansong in Brand X as he geared to launch his own solo career.
Passport Records, the US distributor, had visited the band in the UK. They added to the financial pressures imposed by Charisma Records; both companies were pushing Brand X to add songs and horn sections to their music in order to drive up business. Executives, unhappy with sales, had come close to canceling Brand X‘s contract after 1978’s Masques album, but a Hail Mary pass was granted by the UK label when Robin Lumley, who’d obtained a favorable deal renting Ringo Star’s home studio, a recording facility in Berkshire, near Ascot, “Startling Studio“, offered to combine the simultaneous recordings of Product, and Do they Hurt? in 1979. The Product sessions followed a two-week rehearsal at Farmyard studios, an came under managerial pressures that would further fracture the band’s chemistry, (and weirdly foreshadow Brand X‘s future fate), as musicians elected to split into two separate recording units: half the band recording days, while the other half recorded nights. Phil Collins who was being groomed by Tony Smith for more commercial sounds, led the session that involved singing and a rockier style for the band, while Percy Jones resisted the more commercial approach toward which the management was steering the band. Bassist John Giblin was brought-in to fill a few parts which Percy had no interest in playing. Robin held a middle ground with his compositions. Other members who overlapped the sessions chose not to make waves and even wrote a song about it.
That same year, Brand X was the recipient of another Melody Maker Reader poll award as “Top Jazz Act”.
Phil Collins, whose early enthusiasm for Brand X had helped provide the band with the support of Charisma Records, was clearly losing interest in his mates and the chaotic movements within the group, the heavy drug use in some instances, but most of all, the extraordinary launch of his own solo career in 1980, convinced him to pull the plug on his own commitment.
Of the tapering legacy of Brand X’s creative run, Robin Lumley states: “there were no hard feelings; we just ran out of music to write together”.
Phil Collins, for his part hardly ever mentions Brand X, and never as more than a footnote; he has kept away from his former band mates since 1982.
Brand X toured the UK one final time in 1980/81, double billing with Bill Bruford’s band. It then featured Goodsall and Jones, with Robin Lumley or occasionally Peter Robinson who alternated on keyboards, and Mike Clark on drums.
Some of the musicians who played on original Brand X compositions and studio releases over a period of five years would include: Kenwood Dennard (Drums), Morris Pert (Percussion), Peter Robinson (Keyboards), Chuck Bürgi (Drums), Mike Clark (Drums), John Giblin (Bass), and Jack Lancaster (Saxophone). During the ’70s, Brand X were also joined in live settings by Mike Miller on guitar, as well as Bill Bruford, Jeff Seopardie and Preston Heyman on percussion.
In 1980, on the night of the last concert played by Brand X for that decade, Percy Jones and John Goodsall were served with court papers backstage by a solicitor acting on behalf of Island Records. An employee of Hit & Run snatched the documents out of Percy’s hand and told the lads to “not worry about that”: “that” turned into an out of court settlement in favor of Island Records, which Percy and John never learned about, and whose financial stakes were never disclosed to them.
Brand X disbanded after Tony Smith of Hit & Run Music, now focusing on Genesis, and on Phil Collins’s career as a solo superstar, released Goodsall and Jones from his management oversight. But Hit & Run did continue to represent Lumley, and Collins, among others, and, until present, still owns and manages all the publishing, mechanical, and performance rights to Brand X’s compositions written and published between 1976 and 1982, representing the bulk of their music. Goodsall, Lumley and Jones were informed of the scope of “their debt” since 1975.
Percy Jones had already moved to New York, and John Goodsall became a session man in Los Angeles.
In 1982, an album of rough mixes and demos, Is There Anything About?, was scrapped together by Robin Lumley, mostly from outtakes, and upon request from Charisma, via Tony Smith who remained his manager. It contained a handful of original leftover compositions by Goodsall and Lumley, but never met the standards of the band as a whole, and is not really considered an album by which they stand – including on the part of Lumley.
A decade later, in 1992, Percy Jones who’d been playing with drummer Frank Katz in New York, wound up short of a guitarist for a new musical project he was developing, and had the idea of calling his long time friend John Goodsall who lived in California. Goodsall agreed to jam with his old band mate, and Ozone Records, the label, immediately sprung upon the opportunity to insist that the new lineup be called Brand X, so as to attract more punters to the event. Reluctantly, Jones and Goodsall, agreed to using the name Brand X, after Robin Lumley gave his verbal blessing. Still, Jones and Goodsall conceded that it may have been misleading to listeners and fans… Lumley had moved to Australia and was then working in Perth, producing local television, and composing symphonic music. He was happy to see his old mates carry on.
A far cry from the extended rehearsal and recording sessions of the 1970s, the album X Communication was assembled hastily, and released in 1992, to mixed reviews, and disappointing commercial returns. The band toured, mostly on the West Coast of the US, where John Goodsall lived.
In 1997, a similar opportunity to reunite Goodsall, Jones and Katz arose, and led to the album Manifest Destiny which was also released under the name Brand X. The album was engineered in Long Beach, California this time, by Genesis producer David Hentschel, and featured Brand X godfather and name bestower Danny Wilding on the flute, as well as Tunnels’ Marc Wagnon and Keyboardist Franz Pusch.
In later years, Brand X would welcome as many as another dozen guest performers who joined them for live concerts, performing from a catalog of existing compositions, when the band would occasionally reunite, as opportunity arose. Some of these performers included drummer Pierre Moerlen (of Gong), Keyboardists Kris Sjoebring and Chris Clark, and drummer Kenny Grohowski.
Manifest Destiny would be the last album of original compositions released under the name Brand X.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Goodsall, Lumley and Jones would each be involved in the release, to varying extents, of Brand X recordings from lingering backlogs of demos, often in the form of old live performances or rehearsals and outtakes:
Live at the Roxy (1996), Missing Period (1997), The X-Files (1998), Timeline (2000), and Trilogy (2003).
Following the period of the 1970s, of all the releases under the name Brand X, and despite frequent international reissues and box sets by Charisma Records, and Virgin, no doubt generating profits for record companies over three decades, Brand X, like so many bands, are still in a black hole…
In 2010, Lumley, Goodsall and Jones learned of the passing of percussionist Morris Pert, who died of a heart attack at the age of 62. Pert hadn’t played live with Brand X since the 1978 tour.
Brand X: nostalgia, tribute bands, chaos, storms, and retirement (Bringing our fans up to speed!)
In 2016, Brand X came together, again without Robin Lumley, (who despite having returned to the UK, had retired from performing live) for what would become a series of “nostalgia concerts” in association with a new US management who, out of commercial concerns, prescribed strictly playing compositions from the 1970s. The lineups, (which included John Goodsall and Percy Jones, and featured a session player, Chris Clark, on keyboards, veteran Kenwood Dennard, then Kenny Grohowski on drums, included a former law enforcement specialist, Scott Weinberger on percussion,) would perform a series of short tours until 2019. Ex-cop turned wealthy cable producer, percussionist Weinberger, who was fond of repurposing musical acts as tribute bands, fronted the money to organize the reunion shows on the expressed condition that he be included to perform live in the stage lineup with the other musicians—a first in the recruitment process for Brand X guests… Goodsall and Jones were excited about the possibility of taking their baby back on the road after several failed attempts over two decades. That excitement was mitigated by apprehensions over their business partners which would amplify over time. But feeling that the end might justify the means and knowing that fans would get to see Brand X again, they opted to give it a try.
A complicated reunion:
If the reunion was initially received with enthusiasm, it soon became burdened by recurring managerial issues which the band came to see as an endless repeat of the many problems that had plagued them in the past. John Goodsall, who had been living on an expired immigration visa in the US, could not travel beyond immediate borders, and had to bow out of any touring plans abroad; the band was unable to return to the UK to perform, despite enthusiastic requests from loving fans and club owners. Goodsall, who had on occasion, begrudgingly been replaced by guitarist Alex Machacek when the band performed outside US maritime borders was frustrated with the arrangements of touring, despondent over having spent “one too many nights sleeping on a cold airport floor”, and tired of the spiraling repetitions of performing old tracks “like a jukebox”. He and Percy often expressed a desire to break-out and compose new music, but felt at times rebuffed by their management, who predicated performing tracks from the ’70s based on polls they conducted. Worst of all was a mounting frustration among Jones and Goodsall, that despite a stream of trickling handouts, no formal accounting came their way. “No matter how poor we are, we deserve a modicum of respect as persons and musicians”, Jones states, looking back.
Percy Jones, on consultation with mates John Goodsall and Robin Lumley concluded that the experiment was unsuccessful and refused to continue to allow the US managers to represent Brand X. Jones was mistakenly described in Press reviews and in Wikipedia as “having left”: this is wrong! It’s worth noting that Jones never left his own band, Brand X, and is still very much the owner of his title in the band, and now, absent John Goodsall, the de facto leader of Brand X, which he helped create.
This led to predictable disputes, and a grotesque series of “official” musical chair announcements by US managers, and desperate bids to replace Brand X members. “Why are these people trying to replace Percy Jones and John Goodsall in Brand X?”, lamented Robin Lumley; “There can be no Brand X without either Percy or John!” With no permission from Percy Jones, or Robin Lumley, the management attempted to recruit bass legends Jeff Berlin, and Nick Beggs, among others… But most veteran music business professionals know how to vet people, and the fiasco going on at Brand X Central was the scuttlebutt of many a musician’s water cooler chat: various Prog musicians communicated privately, warning each other off. Ultimately, word got out and the efforts to force a new lineup fizzled.
Amid this behind-the-scenes chaos, co-founder John Goodsall, was short-stopped by the dreaded pandemic. To add injury to insult, he suddenly passed away of complications from *Covid-19 on November 10th 2021, at Rochester, Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, where he’d been rushed.
John Goodsall’s ashes were scattered out at sea, off the California coastline, in a ceremony organized by his daughter Natasha, and entirely financially supported by the generosity of fans through an online fundraising campaign. The ceremony was attended by his family and next of kin. His lifelong band mate Percy Jones was among the attendees.
Epilogue:
Support the real musicians of Brand X
That same month, Robin Lumley called for an end to Brand X, and was joined unequivocally by co-founder Percy Jones in calling for the band to be retired for good, as it cannot and should not persist under this management, any more than it should continue, absent their co-founder John Goodsall.
Robin states that, “Brand X should exist in the memory of its creators and of its loving fans as a musical statement from a highly creative time that belongs in the past.”
Robin Lumley and Percy Jones have made it clear that the band’s compositions must be left in peace, and the band can no longer be made active without their approval.
©2023, The Independent Liberation Army of the Sovereign People of Brand X. Musicians and creators will prevail!
Suggested additional Resources:
The following Web links contain some very good (and highly accurate) information about the timeline of Brand X performances and releases… For data about the motives, backroom dealings, robberies, muggings, skullduggery, gossip, and plain facts behind the real history, keep reading this official Brand X website, the ONLY Official domain of the band Brand X, run with the oversight of actual musicians of Brand X.
Part 1:
https://www.genesis-news.com/c-Brand-X-Special-An-Unorthodox-History-Part-1-s660.html
Part 2:
https://www.genesis-news.com/c-Brand-X-Special-An-Unorthodox-History-Part-2-s663.html
Part 3:
https://www.genesis-news.com/c-Brand-X-Special-An-Unorthodox-History-Part-3-s668.html
Brand X is now strictly Percy Jones, Robin Lumley, and the estate of John Goodsall, his daughter Natasha Kaneda. Official Brand X announcements are considered acceptable through this website only.
1968.1.30
1978
After playing a rehearsal gig at Northeye Prison, in Bexhill, Brand X travels to Knewbworth for an outstanding outdoor performance.
The lineup includes (from left to right).
Road manager Steve “Pudding” Johnson (far Left), Morris Pert (barely visible), Percy Jones, John Goodsall, and Chuck “the vegetarian drummer” Bürgi on drums. Peter Robinson is off on the right side.
On the road with Brand X
Read about Brand X's day of dueling open air gigs across the English Channel one fine day in 1977!
SOUNDS Magazine, October 1, 1977 / A report filed by “Joe Journalist”, Dave Fudger & Tarka The Otter, as they join Brand X on a little trip.
IT ALL STARTED out as a cheap stunt to get some easy press. Sleazy music biz weirdos in grubby, Soho backstreet offices conspired to sucker unsuspecting Joe Journalist into filling a page of Music Cliché, the world’s leading rock organ, with complimentary though meaningless drivel about the latest quintet of punk rock deviationaries — The Existentialist Sloganeers. Tarka the Otter, the Sloganeer’s publicist, phoned Joe at the Music Cliché office and fed him the bait. Joe would be taken in the band’s private hovertrain to see them play at the 10th Annual Yorkshire Miners Open Air Rock Festival at London’s Crystal Palace Bowl, them immediately after their set, he would be whisked off along with the band in a specially chartered airship to Hobart, Tasmania, where the Sloganeers would be playing another festival gig that same afternoon!
Two open air gigs in one day! on the, same planet! it had never been done before. How could a pioneering journalist/gullible ligging hack like Joe resist the offer to witness such an historic rock ‘n’ roll event? The answer was — easily, for Joe, alias yours truly, had been offered another er . . . lig. This one involved chasing punters at two open air festival gigs (on the same afternoon!) with a quintet of jazz rock deviationaries — Brand X. The open air fests in question being Crystal Palace Garden Party X and the Fête De L’Humanité 1977 near Le Bourget, Paris. France.
The plan was simple: Brand X’s gear had been driven out to the site of the two-day French test and duplicate stuff — keyboards, amplifiers, effects units, percussion, etc, — were hired in England for the Crystal Palace gig. (Brand X drummer and founder member, Phil Collins being an ultramegastar with the Genesis beat group, can lay claim to at least a couple of drum kits and so he had no need to hire.) I was to be limoed to the Crystal Palace bash and immediately following the band’s set we were all to be flown from nearly Biggin Hill aerodrome to Le Bourget on a specially chartered private plane (see fig. a) and thence by road the short distance to the festival site. That was the plan.
Interesting developements in my private life, (that I can’t go into here) meant that I missed the limo for the Palace, but a frantic taxi ride across London” got” me to the gig (miraculously) in time for the opening number of the band’s set (also averting a nervous breakdown on the part of the Brand X publicist — not Tarka the Otter). After all the much publicised toings and froings in the Brand X drumming department it was a surprise to see Phil Collins and not Kenwood, Dennard in the drum seat. The rest of the line-up was the usual — percussionist Morris Pert, bassist Percy Jones, guitarist John Goodsall and keyboardist Robin Lumley.
They opened the set with a track from the ‘Moroccan Roll’ album, ‘Disco Suicide’, lousy onstage monitoring and an out of tune mini-moog led to a few splungy bass and keyboard eruptions but didn’t detract from the overall excellence of the number’s composition. It beats me why certain reviewers continue to compare Brand X to Weather Report. It shows a remarkable amount of ignorance about the different musical approaches of the two groups. Where Weather Report choose very often to build an instrumental theme slowly over a very long period within a number with a few variations, Brand X are wont to establish themes very quickly, moving very quickly to solo passages and changes of tempo and texture giving their music a much more intense and charged feel than the cool stratification of Weather Report.
The two bands each have stunningly original bass players, Pastorius and Jones being the two most important around at the moment, but they are distinctly different. As the two bands’ approaches to soloing and use of keyboards. Lumley’s work as a record producer has given him a unique ability to place the sound of his keyboards very subtly, and there are times at the end of Goodsall’s solos when you realise
with some surprise that a slowly thickening layer of piano or organ chords he has been growing beneath the guitarists alternately dreamy and fierete workouts. The two of them swap roles within this relationship throughout their performance. At the end of ‘Disco Suicide’, following healthy applause, Lumley dumped the offending mini-moog and the band proceeded with ‘Nightmare Patrol’. Following the eeriness of the opening passage it became apparent that the peculiar acoustics of the venue were having a far from happy effect on Collins’s drum sound, a slight natural echo was producing a very boxy flat sound — it was no wonder that on the way to Biggin Hill, after the set Phil was making far from complimentary noises about the Palace site Morris Pert’s percussion didn’t seem to be affected quite as badly and the mad Scot was whirling around in his sheepskin jacket like a yettie on speed, knocking seven shades of rhythmic bliss out of a ‘not quite everything plus the kitchen sink’ set-up. ‘Nightmare Patrol’ was followed by Percy’s ‘Malaga Virgen’ and a recent Pert composition ‘Deadly Nightshade’ closed the set. The sound hassles had spread from Phil’s drums to the p.a. and at one time according to Lumley, he could hear football results through his monitor speakers louder than he could hear the rest of the band.
Brand X quit the stage in a hurry, ignoring calls for more and in a matter of minutes we were in a minibus rushing through the second part of the plan to go wrong.
The British concert-going motorist is probably only exceeded in terms of stupidity and pigheadedness by the French counterpart (more of them later). In an attempt to leave the Crystal Palace grounds by a special exit we encounter two examples of said motorist. Number one fails to understand that his way into the concert is also somebody else’s way out and blocks the entrance for five minutes haranguing a steward who has a query with dummy’s ticket. In the meantime motorist number two has parked his car leaving the handbrake off allowing it to roll gently down a slope into the side of our bus.
No time for a murder, we got a plane to catch.
Zoom dangerously through narrow lanes. A terse Phil Collins emits a deadly vibe, seemingly more than a little pissed off at the rush job he feels the whole exercise has become. Ever affable R Lumley defuses the tense situation with his usual off the wall view (he suggested the headline for this piece). Lumley, a long-time aviation nut, knows the Biggin Hill area quite well, giving directions to our driver and pointing out landmarks/places of peculiar interest as we flash past. We pass the Metropolitan Police Dog Training School “where they teach alsations to bark ‘alio, alio, alio” says Lumley.
Organising the jaunt was obviously quite an achievement and limited rehearsal time was probably the reason for Phil’s disgruntlement. The polymorphous nature of Brand X meant that the week preceding the Crystal Palace bash had seen Phil writing songs for Genesis, Percy Jones playing bass with Big Jim Sullivan and Rob Lumley mixing the forthcoming Bill Bruford album — little time for rehearsal.
We arrive at ‘The Famous Battle Of Britain Airfield’ to discover that our continental air traffic controlling cousins are industrial actioning away across the channel, and our take-off will be delayed for an indefinite period. We retire to the airfields modest refreshment facilities for tea and scones. Tarka the Otter looks pale (is this the end?), other members of the party look bored/annoyed/amused (delete where not applicable). Phil talks of parachuting onto the stage with an inflatable drum kit. John Goodsall talks of his ‘punk’ number ‘Complete Garbage’, sample lyric: ‘Now I want to go to the toilet with you . . . .’, Percy and Morris take the air. Rob talks of interesting goings on at his home from home, Trident Studios, where one current work in progress is an album of The Bible. Mr Lumley has apparently been causing some hilarity by interrupting mixing sessions with requests to the engineers to collect certain things from Trident reception — plagues of frogs, fire and brimstone, Joshua and his horn section — that kind of thing.
Phil suggests that the band phone the gig over. Goodsall goes into his rap about straights — a parody of the superstar’s disdain for the ticket-holding punter. Rob informs of his impossibly tight schedule as ‘well-known jazz rock producer’, having recently twiddled the knobs for Jack Lancaster, aforementioned Mr Bruford, Gary Boyle, Rod Argent as well as supervising the assemblage of the forthcoming Brand X live album. Tired of being known only as jazz/rock man he asks if I’ve heard any interesting groups of the punk rock ilk that he might check out with a view to doing some recording. (New wavers take note.)
After a forty-minute bout of time killing we eventually board the waiting De Havilland Heron HS114 (see fig.a) and within minutes are soaring over the tidy little gardens of suburban Kent heading for the channel.
We are met at Le Bourget airport by Jean Claude, from Phonogram, Brand X’s label in France and are quickly en route to the festival site. Quickly, that is until we encounter the French festival going motorist in his thousands. This interesting creature has a unique disregard for the common sense practice of parking off the road. For the two or three miles of our journey to the gig we find the approach roads choked with apparently abandoned cars, the result of a massive outbreak of French free-form parking. What would normally be a five minute trip takes us almost as long as the preceding cross-channel flight.
After removing the paint from the sides of countless Renaults, Citroens and Fiats, we arrive backstage. The stage, may I say, she is magnificent. With commendable frog flair what the bands get to play under is an enormous tent supported by hydraulic arms (see fig. b) that comes on like a giant hang glider. And when you get up on the stage and look out on your 200,000 audience there’s none of that vast expanse of Wally shouting denim, they Frenchies got a fairground ain’t they, and down amongst the sprawling roundabouts and helter skelters there are forty restaurants and cafes, no Fred the burn artist two-quid burger stands, but real food.
Mind you backstage the food ain’t so hot. Minutes prior to taking the stage Brand X cop their refreshments, an imaginative Gallic version of the hot dog featuring a generous chunk of french bread containing what must be the world’s spiciest sausage, after a few bites on one of these little devils you have to put your tongue out in an ashtray. Still the beer’s alright.
The French, not suffering from the currently fashionable scorn for the music of the Brand X ilk that’s prevalent in the UK. when the band take the stage they are greeted like major league gods — 200.000 voice full-throated rapture, the big ‘alio. And, as is customary with any band worth such a greeting, Brand X repaid the audiences enthusiasm with a set about 200 per cent up on the Crystal Palace thrash.
The sun started to set. Lumley introduced the set (in French), the band began to play (it soon became evident that the sound, at least where I was in the Press/photographers/ liggers pit in front of the stage, was immaculate) and all was right with the world. The set was exactly the same structure as the one that Brand X played at Crystal Palace — ‘Disco Suicide’, ‘Nightmare Patrol”, ‘Malaga Virgen’ and ‘Deadly Nightshade’. All played this time with much more humour — particularly on the parts of Lumley and Goodsall, the latter throwing in jokey, stumbling parodies of riffs he had previously been diligently blazing and soaring his way through.
Percy, once again, danced majestic on his fretless Fender, only a little phased by a niggling electronic hum on his solo in ‘Malaga Virgen’. Morris, minus specs, jigged a fine latino rhythm figure through ‘Deadly Nightshade’, looking far from the academic that his off stage persona suggests. Only Phil seemed unhappy, afterwards complaining that he just couldn’t get into it, though you would never have known it from his playing.
At the close of their set the overrunning schedule forced the band to leave the stage promptly, again ignoring the crowd’s calls for an encore. Then it was back to the bus and a long wait while some mate of Phil’s, Peter somebody or other, who we wuz giving a lift back to England did his stuff for the Fête De L’Humanité hordes?
Rapid exit via now less congested roads, to Le Bourget, whisky and wine on the bus. More wine on the plane and eventually, wearied by this high pressure De Havilland Heron set living I sank into the sunset (well moon rise actually). The last thing I recall clearly before pegging out was seeing a harrowed looking publicist on hands and knees searching for Phil’s mate’s contact lenses and Morris and Morris and John Goodsall agreeing that “you should never trust a straight midget.”
Pity you’ll never get any of this on the live album.
