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Rating: This is not a review, but an article written by the founding member of National Health. The suitable place for it would be a now-defunct section called “insights.” I dedicate this article to all fans of progressive music, particularly to those of the scene known as Canterbury.
1975 was a difficult year for thinking rock musicians; the peaceful years of “progressive” rock, when it was rewarding to be creative and original, were over, and the music industry had entered a sort of horrible two-year gestation period that would result in the birth of punk. In other words, just when the rock business and British media were turning their backs on decent music and instead organizing to promote one of the coarsest, most simplistic, brutal, horrible, and stupid forms imaginable, in an atmosphere where admitting not knowing how to play was hailed as a display of genius, my friend and fellow keyboardist Alan Gowen and I decided to form a large-scale rock ensemble to play intricate, mostly instrumental music. Rest assured, we were not doing it for fashion. Our grand initial ideas for National Health involved a nine-member lineup: two keyboards, two guitars, three female voices, bass, and drums. The group would try to mix my heavily arranged and written music with Alan’s improvisational pieces. We wanted to include both guitarists from our previous groups, and on my part, I also invited the bassist and composer from my first band. From all of this, in July 1975, the nucleus of National Health Mk.1 was born: Dave Stewart and Alan Gowen on keyboards, Phil Miller (ex-Hatfield) and Phil Lee (ex-Gilgamesh) on guitars, Mont Campbell (ex-Egg) on bass. I also wanted to add the voices of Amanda Parson, Barbara Gaskin, and Ann Rosenthal, but circumstances and a small dose of good sense (almost certainly not mine) meant that only Amanda joined us.
“Drummer wanted, must be able to play in unusual time signatures,” said our ad in Melody Maker. I’ll add: or at least know how to play. Thinking back on the number of problems we encountered trying to find a suitable drummer for the group still surprises and depresses me. The obvious choice would have been Pip Pyle, but I worried that the presence of three members from my previous group could transform them into a sort of Hatfield & The North Mk.2.
So we placed the ad. It was hell. After receiving the usual barrage of calls from old percussionists looking for cruise ship engagements, guitarists (not illiterate but curious to know if we also needed a guitarist), axe murderers, contortionists, and trapeze artists, we auditioned about twenty-five drummers, including some “names.” They were all absolutely pathetic. I was astonished that any of them could have made a reputation for themselves, as they all seemed terrified by our music and couldn’t keep up with it even in a rudimentary way.
However, there was one drummer who made a great impression on us. For one thing, he was half a meter shorter than me, but the most impressive thing is that he had sewn yellow satin triangles at the bottom of his pants legs to flare them. Here’s our man! Despite me giving him a very precise phone briefing, he arrived convinced that National Health was the name of some musical and asked when the show’s opening night was. To alleviate the general atmosphere of despondency, we tried to get him into one of our “easier” sections, a riff taken from Elephants. It was in 25/8. The short guy wasn’t a bad drummer, but this was beyond his musical experience. After a few minutes of thrashing (which sounded as if accompanied by a free percussion concert), we stopped, and I explained that the twenty-fifths could be subdivided into three groups of six and one of seven. This produced no noticeable difference (riff of Elephants accompanied by an air attack), so I further explained that each group of six eighth notes could be considered as two bars of ¾ at double speed. That was a mistake. Upon hearing ¾, the drummer’s eyes lit up, and before I could count, he launched into a frenzied waltz time, punctuated by random seven-shot, monotonously uniform, robotic tom fills, in a different time signature. We tried to sync up, but it was chaos; the musical carnage that followed exceeds my descriptive abilities. When I turned to Alan for moral support, I saw he had hidden, sliding under the Fender Rhodes and was lying on the floor, panting and convulsively crying while trying to suppress his laughter.
Fortunately, someone at Virgin had given my number to Bill Bruford. The first rehearsal went very well; Bill could read music, so he found no hidden terror among our complex arrangements. We liked his assured style, and he seemed to appreciate that we were all more or less able to coax a melody from our instruments. It was never going to be a permanent arrangement because Bill had other commitments and hoped to eventually form his own group (of which Stewart later became a part, ed.).
We had no idea how we would earn a living, but at least now we had a band. Encouraged, we began rehearsing a plethora of new compositions: The Lethargy Shuffle, Clocks and Clouds, Brujo, Bells, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Zabaglione, Tenemos Roads. With this daunting repertoire, in January 1976, we set out to terrify British youth in technical school canteens, recreation center gyms, and all the other unsuitable venues that pass for auditoriums in this country. But before we even set foot on stage, we encountered the first of eight billion problems that seemed to plague the band's entire life. Phil Lee, perhaps sensing my residual hostility towards bebop solos, declared he was unwilling to continue and left for a tour as Charles Aznavour’s accomplice. Fortunately, we managed to replace him at strategic dates with our old friend Steve Hillage, but that left us with a temporary drummer and a highly temporary guitarist. After the first tour, Mont Campbell left the group, having been reminded of the reasons he had left the rock scene in 1973 (the essentially non-spiritual nature of motorway food... jam sessions at soundchecks where everyone plays a bunch of crap... my terrible jokes in the van). But at that moment, it was the least of our concerns; we were ready to record the first LP, and even though the press had ecstatically welcomed our concerts, the record companies had created a wall of indifference. After countless rejections from other companies, the decisive crisis came when even Virgin turned us down.
We couldn’t get a contract, so we decided to continue playing live, replacing Campbell with Neil Murray (ex-Gilgamesh), and for the rest of 1976, we continued to rehearse and take advantage of any opportunity to play live. In 1977, Bill Bruford left us to form the U.K., so I called Pip Pyle, who gladly accepted the invitation. The next to leave was Amanda Parson, followed by Alan Gowen himself, who could no longer handle the sudden lineup changes and lack of progress in general. This left the band in a situation that no one originally wanted; it had become a rock quartet.
It was quite tough for me since most of the material was written for two pairs of hands. However, something good happened during this period; we met a guy named Mike Dunn who was a caretaker and technician of a mobile studio owned by a famous rock star who was struggling to find inspiration in the Bahamas at the time. Mike started recording bands he liked at very reasonable rates, for example, for free. Thanks to Mike and aided by the return of the prodigal Alan Gowen and Amanda Parson, we finally managed to make our first LP in March 1977, which, of course, nobody wanted to release.
Then there was the disastrous organizational experience of the concert at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Hall, as part of a series of concerts titled something like “Genuine Cultural Rock Played by Real Men with Beards,” where I managed to learn the concert time twenty minutes before it began. I had just sent the wind players to dinner. I got very angry and made a speech complaining about the poor organization. At the end of the concert, they withheld our fee, claiming that we had exceeded the showtime and made offensive remarks against the organizers.
Important concert? Prestigious venue? Nonsense! In my time, I’ve played in shitty venues, including the Zoom Club in Frankfurt, where there are no doors on the toilets to discourage heroin addicts from shooting up, the Mobileritz in Antwerp, frequented mostly by transvestites who don't care about the band but applaud the pornographic slideshow that follows. I've played in truly risky clubs and pubs, but I've never been treated so badly anywhere else.
Then came some good news. Joop Visser from Charly Records listened to our tape and liked it; he even listened to it from start to finish without making a single phone call. The album unimaginatively titled National Health was released at the beginning of 1978. Of course, this was too good to be true, so Neil Murray immediately left the band. After all, it had been some time since anyone had left, and he didn’t want this semiannual ritual to fall into disuse. He had been offered a spot in Whitesnake, a rock band that later became very popular (much to our surprise). Fortunately, we quickly managed to replace him with John Greaves, an old friend from the good old days, when Virgin had Henry Cow and Hatfield & The North, before the terrifying Night of the Accountants (Wankernacht), when sharp-suited young men descended in a homicidal fury on the label's ledgers, smashing and burning everything contaminated by the forbidden word music. With him began what would turn out to be our busiest touring period. During this tour, where we had just mastered The Collapso, which we performed with great verve, enormous volume, and occasional accuracy, a certain theatricality began to creep into our stage presence. We introduced a segment in the show titled “Non-Conventional Musician of the Year Contest,” in which Pip, John, and I competed to play in the most ridiculous way (Phil was exempt from this because his usual style was already eccentric enough).
During the tour in France, there was a date I particularly remember; it was a remote village where the complete absence of posters ominously forecasted the worst. John Greaves didn’t appear particularly disturbed, having spent the previous night in silent communion with a bottle of schnapps and was unconscious in the back of the van. He regained consciousness just as the last heavy piece of equipment was moved into the hall, and we started the soundcheck with no sign of the promoter. But first, John had to deal with a mysterious physical phenomenon, real or imagined, that was disturbing him. He became increasingly agitated, and finally, with the cry: what is this terrible smell? He began undressing amidst the general hilarity of the band and technicians. Unfortunately, at that moment, the promoter entered the hall, a nervous and heavily made-up girl who found the sight of John completely naked on stage wildly sniffing his clothes. She had been sitting in a back office trying to muster the courage to face “le group anglais”, and this was certainly not the ideal presentation.
Back in England, we supported Steve Hillage’s tour (April and May 1978), economically a real disaster, but it served very well to refine the pieces. So we went back to the Mobile Mobile (as the recording studio was called by the famous star) to record Of Queues and Cures. Not all the album’s material had been rehearsed; Squarer for Maud was more or less written in the studio, a process that made me uncomfortable at the time but proved entirely justified by the magnificent final result. Most of the pieces were put on tape very quickly, The Collapso in one or two takes, and the overdubbed cello parts played by Georgie Born were recorded outdoors. We were so pleased with Georgie’s contribution to the album that we asked her to join the band along with her friend Lindsay Cooper. Towards the end of 1978, we had exciting rehearsals with Georgie and Lindsay; some of the things we did were genuinely great, like Half of the Sky, which I loved. But it was precisely at this time that a certain element of musical anarchy began creeping in that I perceived as destructive. The band was enthusiastic about playing at least some free music, which I never liked; it all sounds the same to me, and in my opinion, it's more riddled with clichés than other more rigidly organized forms. Then there was the prevailing opinion that everyone should write pieces for the band, but I wanted at least the right of veto; I perceived it as my group and wanted a lot of control over the noise it made.
The final straw came from an organizational discussion when I found out that half of the concert dates had fallen through, meaning we could only afford one “roadie”, who would also have to act as a sound technician, without a lighting rig. I wanted to change the agent, but I found myself in the absolute minority. The others wanted to go on. When you’re really in love with a band and its music, you'll do anything to be able to play. With Egg, sometimes I’d leave for gigs lying on the organ’s pedal board in the back of the van. Once we drove four hundred miles for a single concert, paid twenty-five pounds at a place called the Dead End Club. In National Health’s early days, I would have happily traveled for two or three days without sleep for a concert in Europe, but for me, the story was over; I simply thought the situation would never improve.
I did one last show with the Health in January 1979 in a television program called The Old Grey Whistle Test. We performed a rough version of The Collapso, during which John Greaves definitively won the Non-Conventional Musician prize by hurling a box of cutlery across the stage. Of Queues and Cures was released shortly after, and the band set about finding someone to replace me. This was relatively easy; Alan Gowen was ready to get involved again, and the new quartet (without Georgie and Lindsay) was ready to tour Europe and Scandinavia. Chatting with the roadies on their return, I was almost glad to have missed the tour; apparently, they had driven from Barcelona to Helsinki (something a sane person would not have considered) to be treated like scum, mistakenly booked by discos and then robbed of their equipment in a seedy Paris club. As it turned out, the Health’s days were numbered, but there was one last mountain to climb: America. In the States, the band had gained a substantial following that had made them a cult object almost to the point of mania. I fully understood the devotion’s extent when I went there in the summer of 1979 with Bill Bruford. At every concert, people shouted; Tenemos Roads, Paracelsus, as if they expected we would change the setlist to play a Mont Cambell piece from four years earlier. Given the group’s almost mythological status, I found it easy to put together half a dozen contacts that could be useful for organizing a small American tour. And so it was. I felt proud to see the guys leave to “hit the States like a storm,” as they used to say.
After the tour, Alan left, both Pip and John had other projects, and the group disbanded. I awarded Phil Miller the gold medal for being the only member who never left. I would have liked to avoid writing the following, but in May 1981, Alan Gowen died of leukemia. His death shook all of us, and in the weeks that followed, we reunited the band for a small concert. Ostensibly it was to raise money for the funeral, but as is often the case, it turned into something more. We performed unreleased material by Alan, and it became natural to go on, and in October 1981, we recorded D.S. Al Coda in memory of Alan and his music.
And so it was that National Health, a very unconventional rock band named after a pair of glasses, managed to somehow record three LPs now immortalized in the form of countless little digital numbers. That’s about it, apart from the thanks owed to people who helped this music be heard, and there aren’t many.
Dave Stewart - 1990
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