(MS)
“Half the nation’s gone to war, the other half is out to score”
World conflict looms and GenZ snoozes beneath its vast collective eiderdown. Pressed together almost touching, these children resemble us on that first sanctioned Covid exercise, when we stumbled out into the half-light of Hampstead Heath desperately avoiding each other. Adolescence ends at 32 these days we are told, but what’s going to happen to these kids when they are forced to wake up?
Secondhand’s “Reality” fumbles along in the eye of this very same storm. An oddly philosophical effort, musically birthed in a primitive early prog-psych style. It was pulled together and released against an all too familiar and repeating cycle of ambition, indifference and tragedy. Washed down for inspection, it’s a curio of curios.
Let’s start with the packaging. The garish purple sleeve is striking with a mocked-up medical record on one side and a skeletal X-ray hand reaching out on the other. It’s not clear which is front and which is back. The credits list the songs and musicians and the name and address of someone called Denis James, also mentioned in two song titles and maybe the suggested subject of the piece. The word “Reality” is attached via a printed paper clip, the band name scrawled as Secondhand and the sleeve deliberately battered and worn like Costello’s “Get Happy”.
In fact the band were The Next Collection, a Mod band in the mould of The Small Faces. They changed their name to The Moving Finger before any semblance of fame and fortune could reach them and then had to change it again but not before some pressings of this album listed them as such. The final name Secondhand seems to have been used as much as Second Hand. The sleeve wasn’t deliberately worn it was an uncorrected pressing plant problem, so original copies are somewhat unique in their range of defects. A bad day for E.J Day and Sons you might say. And as for the concept of an album based around a character called Denis James, well that’s somewhat enigmatic too.
Denis James is a clown no less and may be a cipher used to illustrate a state of being, namely the carefree days of youth spent lost in self-absorbed anarchy. For those of good fortune or bohemian inclination an attitude that aspires to last a lifetime. For the less fortunate a brief candle that burns all too soon. At least I think that’s the intention.
Secondhand were 15-17 years old. Their back story is sparse but like so many bomb culture kids they spied a door out of the biscuit factory, invitingly left ajar by pop music. Perhaps they foresaw a permanent escape. But Secondhand never began to make it and just before the recording the young guitarist’s father died soon forcing him to leave the pop dream behind to keep his family a-float. Perhaps that’s why this recording is tinged with such desperate melancholy. Though the producer having a breakdown half-way through the record can’t have helped.
The diagnosis is set out in “Reality’s” opening salvo. “Fairytale” is a re-cycled pop effort from their previous Summer of 67 incarnation, but where the demo version uplifts, this one is mired in dark undercurrents. The conclusion of mother’s swaddling bed-time story is forever threatened and disturbed by the outside world. “Someone’s knocking at the door, don’t let them in”, they sing and darker still, “Father comes home late from work, hard as nails, his stony footsteps on the stairs, ends the fairytale”. Out of shot we conjure verbals, belt-buckles, tears. But worse than the four walls of home lie the grinding malevolence and incessant “Rhubarb” of the adult world. The soulful vocals of Ken Elliot are indistinct throughout this album and here the words seem to emerge as half-heard mumblings about “The Man” on high discussing eugenics and “the animal people”. The music is a brutal, stone-age metal before it had been invented. The effect, not so much background colour, more flashing lights from a blunt object crashed across the skull. Enter, “Denis James The Clown”, slipping into proceedings from a side alley; “The funny man who never lets you down”. A vaudevillian sideshow from a toytown world that tries to seep into this album, but finds its way blocked. A real character or an echo of what went before? Then it’s the ironically groovy “Steam Tugs” and another chapter towards disillusionment. The morning after the party, the rotting room strewn with dormant revellers. The empty tins of Watneys Party 7, the broken bottles, the heaving ashtrays, the pimply youths, the half-dressed girls exposed by the harsh sunshine. A dawn of steam-tug-mugs, with the cockney rhyming marking your peers as completely lacking when the drugs wear off. Back in Denis’ barrel organ arcade, “We Are Slowly Getting Older” pops in to emphasise the point, woozily playing with the stereo spectrum. Our protagonist is growing up quickly but not quick enough and before long the dark thunderclouds envelope proceedings and we hear more about “The Man”.
“Some top men got together, what do you think of that?
They came to the conclusion we’re getting far too fat”
What exactly are you supposed to think when told some top men get together? The dark psych into prog spiralling backward guitars and rumbling explosions suggest nothing good. “The World Will End Yesterday” seems to bring side one to a close in a mood of mutually assured destruction and the untold terrors and corruption of a post-apocalyptic year zero. Heavy shit... and err… “the same thing applies when the old man bought a hat, he put it on a chair where a fat old lady sat”
Flip “Reality” over and “Denis James, Ode to D.J” carries a most bizarre almost Catholic, bridging narrative. It recalls an innocent time where Denis is just one of the crowd of happy sunny Sunday kids on the cusp of life. However, due to the lack of a sixpence to use the chocolate machine his fate is disastrously determined. It leaves us to speculate that the machine is but a metaphor for virtue itself and if denied access then… where do you get your kicks? In this case it turns out to be hard drugs.
“Now he’s gone, won’t see him no more.”
And at this point the album reaches its zenith in a staggering 15minute death-dream through the addiction of “Mainliner” into the stark and long overdue realisation of the adult “Reality”. The church organ on the former is blasted out from St Gabriel’s, Cricklewood, opposite Melrose Avenue, coincidently the site of another Denis…Nielsen’s, first torture chamber. This harrowing song lurches between grandiose funereal pomp and sombre reflective guitar arpeggios. The lyrics may be the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come; a prediction of an imminent and desperate future. Then as though gasping into fitful consciousness from a coma, the machines spark back into life, the head shakes, eyes open and a final moment of realisation unfolds.
 |
| St Gabriel's, Cricklewood |
“When I was just a little boy
My father said to me
He said Son when you grow up
You have to face reality
I travelled round
from town to town
I never thought
I’d ever have to settle down”
The song drives on growing more urgent with its intent
“I travelled in
A dream of ecstasy
But now my dream is gone
I’ll have to face reality
I’ll have to face reality”
Then a key change, like gears shifting on a sharp incline,
“The dream is gone and I can’t carry on
Time is right and there’s a light
Everything is shining, what a beautiful sight
Reality, the dream has gone away
Re-ality, everything is shining”
A chorus of flutes sweep by, like a celestial choir overseeing mankind’s folly, shrieking stridently above a maelstrom of gun shots, grinding tanks and overhead fighter plane duels. The passage slows to bluesy guitars then the string quartet requiem of “Mainliner” ominously returns, setting proceedings to their inevitable close. A furious march of drums and strings develop, spinning and spiralling to a slowly elongated groove with the piercing cellos clawing to the heavens like damned souls escaping from the mire.
The dream is gone and I can’t carry on
Until the time is right
And there’s the light
And everything is shining what a beautiful sight
Off a side street from Clapham Common…52, Elms Road to be precise, the “Bath Song” concludes proceedings with Denis overdosing during ablutions. “Well If you’re feeling down come on and get happy!!” toots the Radio London jingle hot on the heels of the DJ’s stark announcement of Denis’s demise. A DJ announcing the death of DJ, another clue or joke or an accident, like the sleeve pressing?
Post release the departing guitarist Bob Gibbons would never recover from the stress of trying to support his family and took his life before the 1970’s were over. Recorded in a small studio on the Old Kent Roard, the producer Vic Kearney recovered from his breakdown and continued to use the band on other projects. Indeed this collaboration pre-dates the LP and there is a linked connection between the band and an obscure singer-songwriter called Denis Couldry. The Next Collection’s first credit was backing Couldry’s, Kearney-produced solo single “I Am Nearly There”, a brooding meditation on…something or other. Flip the single over and you have “James in the Basement” and though the music is Schlager-lite sing-song stuff the connection of Denis and James may have provided some inspiration. The song fades out to tell us “he’s quite insane…he’s quite insane” and Couldry would ultimately spend the 70’s and 80’s in and out of psychiatric institutions. Prior to this he’d been lead vocalist of Felius Andromeda who warmed up by backing comedy clown Harry H. Corbett on his psychedelic piss-take “Flower Power Fred” before releasing their superb “Meditations/ Cheadle Heath Delusions” 45. The organ recorded by Kearney at that same Cricklewood church used on “Reality”.
And finally. Felius Andromenda’s final single “Funeral” was actually credited to Second Hand in 1972 with a line-up that seemed to merge the remaining members of the two bands. And yet Second Hand were also called Chillum at this time. My head hurts.
(LK)
Real Gone Kids
There is an old
quote, the origin of which I am unable to recall, that goes “I don’t suffer
from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.”, and although I cannot remember
where I heard that particular aphorism, it is most definitely brought back to
the forefront of my mind by listening to Second Hand’s debut album Reality.
There are albums that you listen to once and they become a favourite and albums
that you listen to once and smash with a hammer, but there are the rare albums
that don’t necessarily impress on first listen, or perhaps even the second, but
gently creep into your mind, slowly releasing their quality as you provide them
with a little space and Reality is one of those.
Second Hand were formed by a couple of teenagers in South London in the mid-60s, who were members of one of the first truly post-war generations, but still lived very much in the shadow of the second world war. Though they themselves had not experienced the privations and horrors of the conflict, they would have lived with the effects of those years all around them. The people that raised them and with whom they would interact may well have seen the effects of war up close, who carried the physical and mental scars of combat or the psychological effects of living in fear of bombs raining from the sky. Why is this of note, other than from a historical perspective, because this album is a horror show, not in the sense of it being a disaster, but in the actual sense of a theatrical performance of fear and dread.
Just to indulge
in a slight digression for a moment, the fact that this band and this album
were created by a couple of teenagers is something that should be kept in mind
when listening; it’s not because the album is bad, it most certainly is not in
my opinion, but rather because of something that becomes obvious the further
you delve into this record, which is that the music displays its influences
like a large neon sign. It’s not particularly strange for a debut album,
especially one created by a young group of people, to be somewhat obvious in
its influences, one only has to think of Led Zeppelin’s debut or The Doors
first album, but Reality does not even bother to try and disguise the music
that contributed to its realisation.
The opening of
the very first track should be recognisable by any fan of The Who, and several
tracks show strong influences from The Kinks and Pink Floyd, but that is not
all there is to this album. It would not be unreasonable to ask whether Jimmy
Paige owned a copy of this album, before forming Led Zeppelin, and if someone
told me that it had been an influence on Pink Floyd when writing The Wall, I
would have no problem in believing them.
The reason being
that this album has a lot in common with the aforementioned work in terms of
narrative and structure. Though Reality is not a concept album in the true
sense, it does have a strong sense of narrative within each song, except for
those which demonstrate a strong sense of eccentricity and whimsy, and even a
sense of overarching narrative across the whole album. From the protective
mother in the opening song, to the death from a drug overdose in the final
track, there is a consistent sense of fear of missed opportunities and passing
youth, of failure and excess. This is a horror story of an album, but not of
ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, there is no pricking of the
thumbs, this is the sheer dread of life and the horror of existence.
Upon hearing this
album for the first time it’s easy to dismiss it as just another mildly
eccentric prog/psychedelic rock album, just another, albeit a good one, entry
in the panoply of such albums of the period, but there is something, even on
the first listen, which tempts you to listen to it again; something beyond the
eccentricity of the music in parts. When you
do listen to it again, and you absolutely should do so, it starts to reveal something about itself. This album has some dark corners in which horrors lie, and those corners are the ones in the room you are sitting in
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(PS)
Isn't it funny how some LPs are so evocative of the year they were released? This came out in 1968, and to me it absolutely screams of that year: too heavy for 67 but without the higher production values and techniques that many bands and producers had started employing the following year.
As I stare at the last few Christmas chocolates in the Quality Street tub, it strikes me that this LP is just as mixed a bag; there are so many styles crammed into a relatively short space, and I wonder if the overall feel suffers a bit as a result.
The opening track, A
Fairy Tale starts off as a proper mod rocker: a punchy four chord Small Faces-y
guitar riff after the initial piped organ suspended chords is as impactful as
you could want, and the D# after the G/F/C is also nicely non-standard... then
it switches into full Ogdens psych mode before picking up the riff again to
close.
Rhubarb! is a wilder, blues riff-based thrasher that made me think more of JD Blackfoot than anything else, but I'm searching for a better comparison. It's frenzied and loose, just as a blues rocker should be - but I'm not sure that Ken Elliott's vocals suit this type of wild abandon, it highlights the weaknesses in his voice more than anything for me.
Then we get to the thing that so many bands of the era regrettably took from Sgt Pepper: Denis James the Clown (Arthur Kitchener) is pure vaudeville, like Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band aping up the old cockerney music hall songs from battered 78s found in flea markets. It's irritating and for me, it's the toffee penny in the Quality Street tub (ie still hanging around in late April). A complete turn-off.
Steam Tugs gets things back on track; it's a funky white soul number which makes me think of Mark I Deep Purple. but unfortunately, Bob Gibbons was no Ritchie Blackmore, so there are no guitar pyrotechnics or virtuosity to light things up and make this something extra special.
For Good Old '59 I get the Kinks, all quirky and eccentric, tugging on the nostalgia strings. The World Will End Yesterday with its backwards guitar has a much more psych feel... I get strains of Tomorrow here, but a bit dirtier. Again, Gibbons was no Steve Howe, so there's some flair missing from the guitar lines for me. Denis James the Clown (Ode to DJ) is one of the few occasions on this LP where a musical style is almost revisited; this is more like Steam Tugs, funky but with a slowed down riff, which goes into more of a Traffic sound after a while, a la Paper Sun.
Mainliner is a slower, more introspective track with its phased guitar chords, but I don't think the bass and guitar work together. This disconnect is possibly deliberate, as it appears to be an elegy for a drug casualty, a bit like Procul Harum's Nothing That I Didn’t Know, but more stark. It evolves with church organ and string quartet and becomes something rather more interesting and progressive towards the end.
The Bath Song is more Procul Harum to my ears, but hammed up and I think the melodrama spoils it for me - and again, I don't think Elliott's vocals are strong enough to carry the higher ranges, and it's a shame that this track closes the album.
There is much on this
LP which is fantastic, interesting, challenging... but sometimes I fear it's
let down by limited musicianship, and possibly even the overall sound. I think
in the hands of a better producer, this would be a far superior album for me;
but it's still one I will definitely keep coming back to.
