Good And Gone

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In Spring of 1984 Ted Carroll of Big Beat Records, who had seen and been impressed by the band, offered to finance a recording session. He booked a week at Elephant Studios in Wapping, London and brought in the late great Vic Maile to produce. Maile had produced Dr Feelgood and engineered The Who's Live At Leeds album.

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Bill: "We made a demo at Alaska Studios and I sent it to Vic Maile because I knew he had produced Dr Feelgood, he told me he was not that impressed with my guitar playing or Chris’s bass – too untogether. Vic liked Kenny’s drumming that’s why he produced us. He said could not record a band without a good drummer. Kenny was the engine room behind the band, and Chris and him developed a great rapport."

 

Chris: “We rehearsed it a lot down at Pat’s and we knew what we were doing. I remember it being a good time. Things started happening, which always spurs you on – Ted Carroll came in and started paying for things. It was great to have the chance to go into a proper studios and do proper work.”

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Bill: "Vic also had a lot to do with the Messiahs sound – he definitely sorted out the songs on Good and Gone. So when we came out of Elephant Studios we were ready to gig – almost. Constant rehearsing was a big help, I was not easy to work with! It was a dirty job but someone had to do it. Kenny and Chris locked together and I basically started getting the hang of singing and playing guitar at the same time. John Dummer, the Messiahs’ manager at the time, called it that ‘thing you do’ and it was like a switch that went on that put me into a sort of trance, like an altered state and once I had discovered it I knew everything would be okay. Live, usually once we got wound up I would just make things up and improvise."

 

They had a record now, but still needed a name. Bill had proposed 'The Blues Messiahs', but it was felt this might suggest a more traditional 12-bar blues vibe. Carroll suggested 'The Screaming Blue Messiahs' instead, to better reflect the band's explosive take on rhythm and blues. As Bill said, "It also gave us extra impetus coz now we had an image to live up to. Now we had to scream!"

 

Another more mysterious legend of the name emanates from John Dummer, who became the band's manager after their signing to WEA. As Bill explains in a 1984 Sounds magazine interview;

"Our manager, John, used to live in this house in New Cross – and there was this really bad atmosphere there. People who stayed there had really terrible nightmares and things. So in the end, they moved out and on the day they were moving, John felt this horrible kind of presence. They were in the corridor just about to leave and he turned around and on the top of the stairs there was this little blue gargoyle looking at him and shimmering. That's a fact."

 

The first gig as The Screaming Blue Messiahs took place at Downstairs At The Clarendon, Hammersmith, London on the 11th of June 1984. A handful of shows followed before the release of Good And Gone in the Autumn, from which point things began to take off at speed. Their debut record went straight into the the top 20 of the independent record chart where it stayed for a full six months. The response from the music press to the record, and their ravaging live shows, was immediate and enthusiastic.

 

Of the record, Andy Hurt said in Sounds; "The 'album' splits 50-50 into the camps of rhythm and blues with the staggering masterpiece 'Someone To Talk To' opening affairs on side one. This song is a total justification of the Messiahs' existence, and if they disappeared forever tomorrow they will not have laboured in vain. It's hard not to pick up the needle before track two and play this scorcher over and over again until that coronary finally catches up with you. A song to die for."

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Five songs recorded at Elephant Studios didn't make the cut on Good And Gone. 'President Kennedy's Mile' turns up on Gun-Shy, while 'Holiday Head', 'Let's Go Down To The Woods' and 'Wild Blue Yonder' were recorded afresh for the album, with substantially different intros. 'Growing For Gold' dates back to the Motor Boys Motor days and was never released, though it did feature regularly in early live sets.

 

Other great lost Messiahs tracks never committed to vinyl include 'Accident Prone', a number played sporadically throughout their career and one that took on all sorts of differing forms through the years. It's a furious machine gun barrage sounding like a runaway freight train tumbling headlong down a flight of stairs, and a number which makes you wonder how Kenny's arms and Chris' fingers didn't fall off by the end. 'Vision In Blues' is a similar driving force with an elastic bass riff and choppy guitar jangles. And 'Destroyer' likewise features more sharp karate chop rhythms over a relentless backbeat.

 

On the 24th of July the band recorded their first session for the BBC for John Peel, performing 'Good And Gone', 'Someone To Talk To', 'Tracking The Dog' and 'Let's Go Down To The Woods And Pray'. The songs aired on the 2nd of August. The session was popular enough to warrant two releases by the BBC, one a 4-track 12" and a later inclusion of 'Good And Gone' on an album sampler of Peel Sessions.

 

The Messiahs were also busy on the road performing around London most of the year and in December played five dates in Holland. One of the UK gigs, the Woolwich Tramshed in London, had been witnessed by John Wooler, a producer on The Old Grey Whistle Test on the BBC.

 

Kenny: “There was seventeen people in the audience. It was a good gig despite the fact that there was hardly anybody there and one of these seventeen people came into the dressing room afterwards and said, ‘I work for the BBC, the Whistle Test production team, and I can get you on the Whistle Test.’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, sure’ – We thought it was the ‘I can make you a star’ sort of bollocks. But it turned out to be true and about a week later we got the date for it – 4th December, and so we were the first unsigned band to do the Whistle Test for years. We’d come back from Holland to do the Whistle Test and then flew back out the next day to complete the Dutch dates.”

 

On the Whistle Test the band played two live songs; 'Let's Go Down To The Woods And Pray' and 'Good And Gone'. The latter number illustrates perfectly the affect Bill's unusual bare-handed guitar style had on his instruments. Mid-way through the song he breaks a string and has to reach for a replacement Telecaster from his ever present roadie. According to The Old Grey Whistle Test, the Messiahs were the loudest act they had had on the show thus far.

 

Of Bill's highly unusual playing style Jim Betteridge observed in International Musician magazine; "He plays without a pick, crashing the flesh of his fingers into the strings with little regard for it's mortality. Blood can often be seen splattered across the scratch plate – or the place where the scratch plate would be if it hadn't been removed. To avoid completely razoring the top of his fingers off, and I suppose also because he likes the sound, William uses unusually heavy bottom strings; Rotosound (and nothing else will do) 56, 48, 28, 16, 13 and 12. But he gives 'em such a sound thrashing that one string breaks every couple of numbers and often one a number, and I don't just mean the top strings; Es and As cop it an' all. In the words of his roadie, 'He goes fooking bonkers!' "