Sea View

THE ORIGINAL SLEEVE · AUGUST 1986

Printed in small capitals across the foot of the rear cover of LIDO 14.

THIS IS A RECORD ABOUT A FORTNIGHT YOU HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR. THE FOUR PEOPLE ON THE FRONT OF IT HAVE BETWEEN THEM SPENT ELEVEN SUMMERS WORKING THE COAST YOU ARE THINKING OF, WHICH IS ELEVEN MORE THAN MOST. THEY CAN PLAY, THEY CAN SING, AND THEY TURN UP. PUT IT ON AT THE START OF THE EVENING AND SEE IF I AM WRONG.

— V. DANVERS, LIDO RECORDS, MARINE PARADE, SOUTHEND-ON-SEA

AND NOW

I am the only person who was on both of them, so I suppose it falls to me.

In February 1985 I did an afternoon at Marine Court for a band called Villa Bianca. Eight bars in the middle of a song about the south of France. Forty-five pounds, cash, in my hand before I got my coat on, which was Vic Danvers all over, and I was out of there by half four because they had booked me till six and did not need me. My name is not on that sleeve. That was normal. I have about four thousand sessions behind me and my name is on almost none of them, and if you want to be upset about that you are welcome, but you will be upset on your own.

Eleven months later Vic rang me at home and asked if I wanted to be in a band. Not do a session. Be in it. Name on the front, photograph, the lot. I was thirty-eight years old and I had never been in a band in my life.

So: Tony Kesteven, who is the best singer I have ever stood next to and I have stood next to a few. Colm Behan on the bass, who said about nine words to me in six months and every one of them was correct. And Ruth Ojo, who was twenty-seven, and who played the keyboards, and arranged all of it, and wrote both of these songs, and who is the reason you are holding this.

Ruth had done two years on the boats. She could tell you what the back of a hotel in Alicante smells like at four in the morning. She wrote down what happened to her, and what happened to her was a coach at two in the morning and a key on a wooden fob and a pool being cleaned before six, and she put all of it in, and every word of it is true.

I have thought about this for a very long time and I am not going to explain it to you, because I do not entirely understand it myself and because you have got ears. All I will say is that the other record was written by people who had never been anywhere, and this one was not, and that turned out to matter more than anything any of us could play.

Vic knew. He heard the mix in July and he said something in the office that I am not going to repeat, and then he spent a great deal of money on it anyway, and put it out on a bank holiday because he liked the idea of a record about the end of the season coming out at the end of the season. He had been right about that sort of thing for twenty-two years. He was wrong once and it was this. He knew that by the Wednesday too.

Now. Turn it over.

"Staff Only" is the one. It is Ruth's and it is about the corridor and the bins and the yard with the orange light, and the sea twenty yards away on the other side of a wall where you can hear it and you cannot see it. Ray Hollis wanted it on the front and Vic said no, and Vic was right about what would sell and wrong about what we had, and both of those things can be true on the same afternoon.

I do not play the saxophone on it. I play the flute. It was Ruth's idea and it is the best decision anybody made in that building all year, and Tony sings the whole thing about six inches from the microphone like a man who has stopped trying to sell you anything, and I would put those four minutes up against anything.

Nobody bought it. Fifty-eight, two weeks, gone. That is not a tragedy, that is a Tuesday. We were all paid. We all had work the following month.

The sleeve you are holding is in a frame in my hall in Ilford. It is the only record cover anywhere in the world with my name on the front of it. The one everybody has actually heard me play on is the other one, and my name is not on that.

I think that is very funny. I appear to be alone in this.

— Bev Tulloch