FOOTNOTE ARCHIVES
By Dave Thompson
Think of the British progressive rock scene of the early-mid 1970s, and a handful of labels spring instantly to mind – Harvest, wherein Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Kevin Ayers and Quatermass did their respective things; Vertigo, with the swirly label that obsesses so many; and Charisma, home to Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, Rare Bird and more.
The label was launched by Tony Stratton Smith, a former sports writer and music publisher in 1969, after several years managing such bands as the Nice, the Bonzos, the Koobas and Van Der Graaf had acquainted him with the indignities to which “conventional” record labels routinely subjected their bands. Charisma, he ascertained, would be a gentleman’s label, its sole concern being to ensure that its artists had everything they needed to make their music.It was an idealistic approach that quickly ran into trouble – in 1972, Stratton Smith was famously warned by his accountants that, if he didn’t stop spending money on Genesis, the label itself would soon be out of business. Stratton Smith ignored them, and time proved the wisdom of his faith. When Charisma did finally fold, in 1986, it was because Stratton Smith himself had tired of it – he sold the company to Virgin Records, while he pursued his latest love, writing screenplays.
In between times, Charisma remained a magnificent concern, signing and usually sticking with some of the most singular talents of the age. The Genesis and Van Der Graaf contingents were joined by such now-legendary names as Lindisfarne, Capability Brown, Hawkwind, Trevor Billmus and Bell & Arc, while Bay City Rollers fans of a certain age might recall receiving an unexpected introduction to another of Charisma’s most fabulous acts, String Driven Thing. Their “It’s A Game” was covered by the Tartan terrors for a European hit single in 1977.
String Driven Thing themselves had long since disbanded by then; although anybody searching out the group’s full history will quickly learn that break-ups were a fairly regular pitfall of life in the group. The original three piece line-up, led by the husband and wife team of Chris and Pauline Adams, plus percussionist John Mannion, first flourished at the tail end of the 1960s, but faded from view shortly after releasing a self-titled debut album in 1970.
A later incarnation, without any of the founder members, came together in 1974, and released a couple of albums during the mid-1970s. Today, the Adams are back at the helm of yet another version of the group, and are preparing for the release of their first ever DVD, through the Ozit label. But the line-up that is most affectionately remembered; that gave the world the original “It’s A Game,” and so much more besides, was that which flourished during 1972-73, and which came to epitomize Charisma Records as much as any of the label’s other period giants.
Lining up at the time as the Adams, Mannion, bassist Colin Wilson and violinist Grahame Smith, String Driven Thing first came into Charisma’s orbit in early 1972, when Glasgow-based Chris Adams was in London, hoping to interest the Strawbs’ management in the group, and armed with a tape comprising three demos: “Let Me Down,” “Easy to be Free” and “Regent Street Incident,” “I found myself with time on my hands, so I went into a phonebox and looked thru Yellow Pages for Record Labels. ‘Stratton Smith Enterprises’ jumped out at me, so I phoned and got thru to a chap called Mike DeHavilland, who ran Strat’s Publishing Company, Mooncrest Music. He told me that their offices were ‘above a dirty bookshop in Brewer Street’ and to come right round.”
Adams was impressed and asked if he could hang onto the tape to play to Stratton Smith – much to his own chagrin, Adams had to confess it was the only copy he had with him, and he needed it for his later meeting. But he promised to send another within the week and, when he forgot to do so, DeHavilland was on the phone demanding to know what had happened. “Needless to say, the tape went off that night,” Adams laughed, “and a couple of days later, Mike phoned to ask when he and Strat could come to Glasgow to see us gig.”
The venue the group chose was Burns’ Howff, then the music pub in Glasgow, and already one of the Band’s favorite haunts. Stratton Smith, too, seemed impressed, both with the ambience and the music. “Back at his hotel, he made it clear that he wanted to sign us, and a week or so later, I went south to meet the people who ran the label.”
String Driven Thing were ideal for Charisma, as Adams explained. “Strat’s early progressive signings like Van Der Graaf and Genesis had made hardly a penny, but Lindisfarne, with their folk based harmonies and more straightforward songs were flavour of the month. It was obvious that String Driven had a little of each of these strains.”
Shedding Mannion around the time they signed, the group returned to Glasgow with a princely retainer of £20 per week, to rehearse. A month later, they returned south for their first ever live shows as a “signed” band: a community hall in the town of Tunbridge Wells, where Strat had his country retreat, and the 1972 Reading Festival. It was an audacious entry, but it worked and the group quickly set to work on their first Charisma album, to be titled – like its independent predecessor, String Driven Thing.
Recorded in two weeks in August 1972 with producer Shel Talmy, the album landed rave reviews across the music press, with Melody Maker in particular leaping onto the group’s side. (Amusingly, it later transpired that the album’s distinctive gatefold sleeve, designed by Po of Hipgnosis, cost more than the actual recording sessions!)
“Shel was more in tune with the 60’s ethos of one take, get in and get out fast, than with the carefully crafted, Muso orientated 70’s. In fact, on that first album, he did the mixes by himself, then decided the order of the songs, and we were presented with the finished product. Though he captured the essential energy of the Band, I felt a lot more attention could have been paid to detail.”
Charisma continued to push the band forward. Visiting France, they stopped by the renowned Chateau D’Heuroville studios (the Honky Chateau of Elton John fame), where they were filmed recording some songs with a French producer who later claimed he’d done a better job than Shel Talmy (“he had a point,” mused Adams); December 1972, meanwhile, saw the band fly to New York to support Genesis at that band’s first ever American show, at the Philharmonic Hall.
String Driven Thing’s rise ought to have been inexorable. Their latest single, “Circus,” was making waves on both sides of the Atlantic, and plans were afoot for the group to join Genesis on their own latest tours of both Britain and the US. Unfortunately, the beginning of 1973 saw Chris Adams hospitalised with a collapsed lung, an event that was to have a serious impact on String Driven Thing’s future.
“I walked into the local A&E with chest pains, was diagnosed as having a ‘spontaneous pneumo thorax’ and told I could take to bed and let it reflate slowly over or a month, or they could cut thru my chest wall and let the trapped air out, allowing the punctured lung to reflate. As we were due to start the Foxtrot tour in ten days, I chose the latter. So, still ambulatory, I was taken into a man’s ward, where curtains were drawn round the bed, I was given a local anaesthetic, and two doctors then took it in turns to bore a hole thru my chest with a drill and bit. It took them almost half an hour and when a tube was fed into the cavity, my screams must have traumatised my fellow patients, who had watched me walk in unaided a short time before.”
That experience, and the nightmare of the next week’s worth of agonizing recuperation was to form the inspiration for much of The Machine That Cried, String Driven Thing’s next album. However, although the band did make it onto the British dates, the American shows never happened; instead, the band found itself shunting up and down the British highway system, playing small clubs and universities, and breaking in the new material.
The group’s management at this time was being handled by Charisma’s own in-house team, a less than satisfactory arrangement, but one that Stratton Smith seemed unwilling to change. Indeed, when Adams approached him to speak of the group’s “total lack of confidence” in the set-up, he simply “hummed and hawed and did nothing.” Neither was that the end of the group’s travails. In conversation with another Charisma staffer one day, Adams mentioned that the band was considering adding a drummer to the line-up. A few days later, Stratton Smith showed up at a concert in Oxford, and instead offered them a keyboard player, Robert John Godfrey.
“We agreed to try him out,” Adams remembered, “and our wages immediately went up to £35 a week and gear we had been begging for materialised overnight. [But] having rehearsed for a whole week at Drury Lane, we did one show at the Roundhouse with him, then told Strat he was unsuitable, and brought in a drummer [fellow Glaswegian Billy Fairley] after all.” (Godfrey went on to his own solo career at Charisma.)
In this form, String Driven Thing returned to the studio to record The Machine That Cried, and the single that would subsequently introduce them to a whole new audience, “It’s A Game.” But the powers that be at the label were less than happy with any of it. “When Strat heard the tapes, he was not a happy man,” Adams recalled. “But it was his personal assistant, Gail, who summed up the feeling when she said ‘Why does every band we sign finish up sounding like Van Der Graaf?’”
In fact, The Machine That Cried has since been acclaimed not, merely, String Driven Thing’s masterpiece, but one of the finest progressive rock albums of the entire era – its reissue a couple of years back on the British Ozit label was widely heralded as among the most intelligent rereleases of recent years, and the excitement that greeted the reformed String Driven Thing’s return to action hailed almost wholly from memories of this marvellous album. At the time, however, all seemed doomladen. “It’s A Game,” although it received plenty of British airplay, went nowhere; The Machine That Cried simply died and, by the end of the year, String Driven Thing looked to have followed it, as both the Adams and Chris Wilson walked out. Smith alone was left to carry the flag, rebuilding the group around himself and newfound vocalist Kim Beacon, and soldiering on until 1975.
The two albums that followed both have their place in the prog rock pantheon; but the magic had gone from the band. The Bay City Rollers never looked at them and neither, in the years since their release, has anybody else. By the end of 1975, String Driven Thing had reached the end of its rope.