And The Telephone Church

In the late Eighties and early Nineties I spent a lot of time in the company of my friend Richard Nicholson, aka Billy Penn’s Brother. For reasons that I think only Richard will fully understand, he invited me to be the drummer in his backing band, The Telephone Church. I still pinch myself to think of this: I was most definitely not a good drummer.

The former lead singer of the band Giantkiller, a band I knew nothing about, Richard walked into any room preceeded by his own legend. Part of this also stemmed from the lyrical force and prophetic yearning of his two cassette-only solo albums, Coals of Fire (1988) and Power Blocs/Mustard Seeds (1990). He seemed undaunted at the idea of trying his hand at everything. He was – is – a formidably talented painter and poet – and sometime stand up comedian.

The goal of our rehearsals was to showcase his new songs, with some Dylan and Beefheart covers thrown in, at the Harry arts festival at the end of that summer. We’d gather a couple of times a week in the basement below the festival’s shop front offices on Acre Lane in Brixton. Overawed by the ability of musicians generally (i.e., everyone else in the band), the mantra I lived by was ‘Don’t fuck up.’ What I lacked in technical ability, which was a lot, I made up for by trying to play as little as possible. Richard seemed to like this, encouraging me to ‘play the spaces, not the song.’

In our breaks, Richard would light up his pipe and hold forth on subjects as diverse as the repression of sex in the house church movement and the birth of surrealism in the inter-war years (and, possibly, the connection between them). One of his most memorable monologues was an explication of our band name. Ten-plus years ahead of the internet and twenty-plus the birth of smart phones and social media, he predicted, accurately, that as the glue of old-world networks of unions, religion, family and what he called ‘the village’ dissolved, people would increasingly rely on informal groupings or ‘telephone churches’ to find, create and sustain meaning in their lives. Looking each of us in the eye, he told us we were the first such church – and that there was no way we’d be the last.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying thank you to the people who have sustained me and Tatty this year – my/our own ramshackle and far from organised telephone church comprising late night/early morning WhatsApp messages, email, serendipitous gatherings and even actual conversations. Not to mention the very generous people who frequently comment on this blog. You know who you are. I cannot do this without you.