Feb 27, 2025
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Shriekback - Nemesis
Shriekback - This Is The Science. From the new album 'Some Kinds of Light'
Introducing ‘The Fire Judges’
THE FIRE JUDGES: Barry Andrews, Martyn Barker and Clare Hirst
from an idea by David Somerville
The FJ’s were a hapax legomenon… no, really.
Here’s what happened..
flashback/backstory part 1:
The 101 Club, Clapham 1981. I had gone to see my new friend, saxophonist Clare Hirst, soundcheck with her band The Emotional Spies at the 101. I knew Clare through Sara Lee* the bass player in the recently decommissioned League of Gentlemen (Robert Fripp’s attempt to fuse his Own Inimitable with some post-punk intensity/slackness, in which I played keyboards - well organ actually: very distressed old XTC organ).
There were, it seemed - running wild and free in London - a pack of compelling female musicians from Leeds, some from a seminal collective known as the Bodysnatchers, others, including Sara and Clare, from a unit called Sphynx. This sort of thing was very much a feature of the time (see the 80’s ): non-stereotypical, musically adept Girls In Bands. I was all for it.
(here’s the only known extant picture of me, Clare and Sara all in the frame, taken when we were all briefly in Restaurant for Dogs )
The Emotional Spies were an interesting group: lead singer Jon Lake from Middlesborough (think Vic n’ Bob) with a highly developed aesthetic (American 50’s/Hardboiled Pulp/funky/hip/literate-outsider), bass player Mike Cartwright** (he played a fretless bass very musically, possibly suspiciously so), Fred the guitarist (the Entwistle, just solid funky rhythm, no frills, a centre of gravity). Lovely Clare, of course, all Brixton hair (lots of braids and bits) with jazz inclinations tastefully reined in (she ‘plays the notes you wanna hear’ as Springsteen said of Clarence) and a drummer who looked about 12, was dressed with no concessions to any style-tropes of post-punk metropolitan ’81, and who played these fantastic, effortlessly correct grooves which got me extremely stimulated. It was Mart, of course.
Backstory part 2 It was through Robert Fripp’s League (aka ‘Plague’) of Gentlemen also that I ran into a Whole Scene in Dorset/South Wilts: The Martian Schoolgirls (Blandford), The Kitchens (Salisbury), The XS band (Weymouth) and their associated crews, among which was Andrew Lovelock (son of James, the climate expert), a scientist and libertine who had turned up at LOG’s gigs in NYC wearing a necklace of plastic jungle animals and handing out Quaaludes. He was also the drummer in The Kitchens and introduced me to the Salisbury Scene and to a bloke called David Somerville.
David was planning to move to London to study art and was also - probably not an unalloyed blessing, this - the only black guy I ever saw in his small Wiltshire home town of Devizes. When David eventually moved to London he immediately emerged, moth-like, from his west country chrysalis state into a fully operational Gay-Boy-about-Town, gravitating instinctively to the burgeoning New Romantic Scene at Gossips/Blitz etc. where, according to his own account, much unwholesome Fabulousness was had by all.
Fast Forward to 2006 my own personal voyage is covered extensively elsewhere in this blog and is, of course, entwined with Martyn’s. Clare joined the all-female pop outfit the Belle-Stars, played with Bowie at Live Aid, formed the Clare Hirst Quartet (unleashing all that constrained Jazz) and was doing session work, notably with Hazel O’Connor. We had kept in intermittent real-time contact plus lashings of internet so she leapt to mind when David (now an established artist with shows in London, NYC and LA and with whom I had also stayed friends) rang to say he’d been making films and did I know a sax player who might improv some aural background to a screening?
Quite how this morphed into me, Clare and Mart becoming the soundtrack can be laid squarely at the oversized clown feet of Monstrance, a strictly improvised affair with XTC’s Andy Partridge which Mart and I had participated in earlier that year. w/r/t Monstrance: while the amount of decent material may not have merited a - gulp - double CD, it did have its moments https://vimeo.com/16166207
In case you’re not into that whole text-based thing, here’s a diagram:
So I guess I was in a heightened state of Improv and so, somehow, ended up letting David get us all to do two shows at a nosebleed hip hotel in Clerkenwell (the prices of drinks also caused blood to flow but you couldn’t get mad because the staff were all so beautiful) under the name of ‘The Fire Judges’.
About that: the original Fire Judges were a branch of the judiciary created to deal with the predictable shit-storm of disputes after the Great Fire of London in 1666. You can imagine - what with Londoners and their property obsession - since the fire had tabula rasa’d the (mostly wooden) city, people were apt to get a bit creative about their former boundaries - with consequences most arsy, I have no doubt.
I thought the name had a certain something and the act of improvising is a bit like judging fires, I thought - in particular, how little control you seem to have, which is a virtue sometimes and sometimes ..not. David’s film was shown on a big screen and we reacted musically to the images. He no longer has the film and I can only dimly remember the images but some do persist in memory and I tried to reconstruct them in the titles. The aim was to reflect the urban Lotus Eating, Psycho-Drifting and Latte Quaffing which I feel sure are David’s Core Leisure Activities these days. Hence:
1 Shoreditch Latte 2 Pigeon in a Puddle 3 City Boys 4 Hoxton Latte 5 Insecure Scaffolding 6 Bunhill Fields 7 The Number 24 8 Camden Latte 9 Down the Tube 10 Three Feet from a Rat 11 Wagamama Tower Hill 12 St James Garlickhythe 13 David’s Drift 14 Old Street Latte 15 Behind Curtain Road 16 Existential Oxford Street 17 More than enough Lattes
The album will be available very soon through Shriekback.com
*Sara being also the conduit to Dave Allen, of course, another Leeds muso, so hey, networking kudos to Sara, innit. And, with satisfying circularity, after Dave left the G4NG, Sara joined them.
** Mike Cartwright - as a result of this nexus - ended up playing with Dave’s Noise Abroad project with Luc Van Acker and our first drummer Brian Nevill.
Be Here Tinnitus Interviewed Us
Listen here! http://beheretinnitus.podomatic.com/entry/2016-02-21T19_59_30-08_00
#Shriekback #OilandGold #BarryAndrews #DaveAllen #CarlMarsh #MartynBarker #FishBelowtheIce #RETWEET
