The Continental Set

The Continental Set were four working musicians who had all actually been to the Mediterranean, which turned out to be the worst possible qualification for making a record about it.

Vic Danvers put them together in the second week of January 1986, in the office above the amusement arcade on Marine Parade, out of a card index he had been keeping since 1964. There is nothing furtive about this. Assembling acts was Vic's trade for twenty-two years before he ever pressed anything, and he was extremely good at it — he had personally booked three of these four people, repeatedly, over about a decade, and he knew exactly what each of them could do on a wet Tuesday with no rehearsal. That is more than most people in the record business know about anybody.

Tony Kesteven sang. He was thirty-two, from Grays, and he had done his first season at twenty-one: Torremolinos, Benidorm, two winters in Tenerife, six nights a week, three sets a night, five years of other people's songs. He came home at the end of the 1984 season because his mother was ill, and then stayed, and sang the clubs, and sold Fords in the daytime. He is, by some distance, the best singer anybody on that label ever had. Perfect pitch, perfect diction, and he will learn anything you put in front of him in about four minutes.

He also sings dead on the beat. Every take, every night, for five years, because a man doing three sets a night in a hotel bar learns to be exactly on time and never unlearns it.

Ruth Ojo played the DX7 and the Juno-106, arranged everything, and wrote both songs. She was twenty-seven and from Barking, and she had spent 1983 to 1985 on ship showbands — the Harwich to Hook of Holland run first, then two years on a Mediterranean cruise line. Eleven countries, seen mostly from a service deck and a crew gangway. She came home with a Juno bought secondhand in Piraeus and a notebook containing about forty things that had actually happened to her.

Colm Behan played the bass. Dagenham, Irish parents, thirty-four, eleven previous bands and no illusions of any kind. He was the best musician in the room and the easiest man in Essex to book, because he tells you the money and the call time and then nothing else at all. He has never described a piece of music as more than fine, or not finished. He has not given an interview about any of this and he is not going to.

The saxophone, the flute and all the percussion were Bev Tulloch, from Ilford, who was thirty-eight and had been doing sessions for fifteen years. In February 1985 he had played eight bars on a record called "Riviera" for forty-five pounds, in cash, on the day, and his name was not on the sleeve. In January 1986 Vic Danvers offered him a place in a band and his name on the front of a record, and he took it. It is the only band Bev Tulloch has ever actually been in.

There was no drummer. Vic hired a LinnDrum and Ray Hollis programmed it, and Bev played the congas and the cowbell over the top by hand.

They recorded in May and June of 1986 at Marine Court Studios in London E1, with Ray Hollis producing — the same room and the same producer as "Riviera", which was not a coincidence and was never presented as one. Vic had the money that year and he spent it on this: four days on the Costa del Sol in July for the photographs, a proper four-colour sleeve, a plugger who returned calls. Villa Bianca had been given eleven hours in Nice and had come back with a number six.

"Sea View" came out on the bank holiday Monday, the twenty-fifth of August 1986. Vic chose that date because he liked the symmetry of a record about the end of a season arriving at the end of one, and it is the only occasion in his entire working life when he let taste beat timing. It entered at seventy-one, got to fifty-eight, and was gone in a fortnight.

Listen to the words and you will notice something that is the precise opposite of the record it was meant to follow. There is a coach from the airport at two in the morning. There is a room key on a wooden fob. There is a pool being cleaned before six, and a third set that nobody listens to, and a woman asking for a song he doesn't know, and a sea you can only see from the wrong side of the building. Every line is something that happened. Every line is true.

On the other side is "Staff Only", which is the better song, and which almost nobody has heard.

They did one television appearance, on a regional lunchtime magazine programme, on a set with a plastic palm tree on it. A second single, "Long Weather", came out in March 1987 and did not chart. By then Vic had agreed to sell the catalogue and nobody was ever told to stop; it simply stopped, the way most things do.

Tony Kesteven went back to seasons in 1988 and has never really stopped — cruise ships from the mid-nineties, still six nights a week when he wants them, entirely content and happy to say so without being asked. Ruth Ojo went back to sea in 1989 and became a musical director, and has now spent thirty years being paid to be at the Mediterranean, which she will tell you cheerfully is a job. She and Tony have worked the same ship twice. Colm Behan still plays, deps for everyone, and remains uninterviewed.

Bev Tulloch is in Ilford and teaches. The "Sea View" sleeve is framed in his hall, because it is the only record cover in the world with his name on the front of it, and the record everybody has actually heard him play on is the one that hasn't. He finds this funnier than anyone else does.