Waiting for beer, sandwich, flight and ticket getting out of here, something you cant lose. And a pair of new shoes.

I should do something for him.

A movie about Dean Johnson to follow up Behind NME Lines?

Well as James Young’s Nico bio Songs They Never Play On The Radio  shows the greatest stories often lie on the margins. Dean must qualify.

He’s from the other side of the river Mersey, Birkenhead.. written out of Beatles mythology , though a whirlwind trip with Dean round its environs will soon put all the forgotten bits of Beatles across the river story in perspective (like first gig with Ringo in Port Sunlight – seeing that place can give you a whole new perspective on what The Beatles were).

Its been quite a journey in my life since a letter from Dean arrived in my mailbox in 1998 with a copy of his excellent Loser Friendly album. The letter explained he was re releasing the album on his own steam, having got the rights back.

At that time he was offering what was, back then, a unique offer, if I liked the album and reviewed it he would send a free copy to anyone who e mailed him. Tunes like What Am I Gonna Do and Kneeling Down became favourites and I had no problems reviewing it favourably.

Among other adventures since we went to Nashville where he recorded a great EP with Stuart Colman (Everly Brothers, Cliff, Shakin Stevens). Stuart said Dean was his favourite artist to work with. Recording there in Nashville compared to a pick up session  in East London was instructive. Put it this way it would have been cheaper, more efficient, more fun and money better spent to go back to Nashville. It was I guess another case of a break for Dean, another one that failed to produce a self sustaining breakthrough.

Not that he’d get dettered, he’d say it himself he cant do anything else (well making a movie on me kinda proved that wrong, and he can rustle up a mean bowl of grub and do handstands after a full pub lunch – with trifle). But, at a time when community cohesion and rebellious art are in perilously short supply I’m so proud of how Dean has reclaimed the spirit and art of Wilfred Owen, the great and  popular WW1 poet, killed in conflict on the last day of the war, whose Birkenhead connection is often forgotten.

The permanent exhibition The Wilfred Owen Story is one part of it , the other is Dean’s Owen stage musical Bullets And Daffodils. And , did I say he’s decided to make an album producing me, setting my perorations, fulminations, agitations and cogitations set to music? Well he is. Oh to be.. Ernest Thesiger

1 The Beatles I Wanna Hold Your Hand

It is 66 I am 4 and in the sunshine. In the front garden surrounded by my mum’s lovingly tended rose garden in Windmill Rd, in Ballyholme, with my ‘ding a tar’. You dint have to be in San Francisco with flowers in your hair to catch the vibe it was all around. It was too much, the music was there, it had been in the air, it was every fucking where and I realised .. it was my religion and it still is. I had to play this to the kids coming home from school. Could I really sing? Could I play this Beatles guitar (last seen rusted in the garden back of 47, years later saw one for sale on Melrose for 600 dollars)? I wasnt at school yet but the kids coming home  were there to laff or whatever. Did I give a shit? Did i eck as like . I was possibly in my mums high heels,  at this stage, knowing the  licentious glory contained in the heart soaring central thrill rocket of this guitar and handclaps spectacular, through…Instinct?

2 The Rolling Stones As tears Go By

The scene moves on a few years a few feet into the lounge room there in 47 Windmill. In Ballyholme. In 1968. And the dolour is in that room, with the brown carpet, and the china cabinet and the coloured matches and trinkets from afar. Mother of Pearl from New Zealand with a lock of some baby’s hair. And theres the record player and theres’s the Rolling Stones records, Sharon my big sister had ferociously good taste, all the singles and I love em. I love the screaming that,  years later, Andrew Oldham told me was grafted on from other sources to a studio recording on Got Live If You Want It EP, the shiny sleeve covered with Sharon’s lovehearts to the band.. I love Satisfaction, Cloud, Not Fade Away and –  its saintly, reverberating, trippy doom  - Paint It Black but I keep being drawn back to this. Not sure why, I almost dislike it for making me like it – it seems wrong for them. But right, increasingly right, for the moment that is unfolding.

3 Cat Stevens Cant Keep it In
It is 1973 I feel I am newly arrived on the fields of music – for a minute there, with all them deaths, Jimi and Otis, and Duane and Jim, Janis and Brian, oh Otis, even Otis… it seemed like music was over . After 68 United won the Euro and the boy from Belfast became the be all and end all . And then he left United and I was in my teens coming into view with matters puberterical. And I’d been sniffing round, buying bits and bobs here and there, 2nd hand, getting tunes from kindly relatives, they still loved the music but not collecting-precious types, they passed on tunes.  But this , 48p, was the first full price (Co-op may have gave a 2 p off offer) record I ever bought. Still sounds insanely great to me. I wondered, but never asked Yusuf Islam ,when I spoke to him for the release of Another Cup album , if its uninhibited libidio  prevents him, post conversion, from performing it, ever again.

4 Doctor Feelgood
Back In The Night
Like their punk successors I read of the Feelgoods and saw pictures of them in the music papers sometime before I saw them. Then there was maybe a pre first album recording session or maybe just a first record I heard one night on John Peel. I was in the back double room now, overlooking the big back garden in 47 and my dreams were HUGE. Hearing Peel before slumber was the archetypal friend over the bedsheets, a ferryman to a world of infinite possibilities. Sweet dreams were made of such And when he played this. Suddenly the exciting night got even more exciting.

5 Todd Rundgren
(The True Meaning Of ) The verb To Love

It is  the day after Elvis died and it is still sinking in, I feel, among the wider community here on Ballyholme beach on a radiant summer sunny day. We have recently marked the Jubillee, sleeping out on the bathing boxes, the night Yacht Britannia sails into the bay playing GSTQ. We awake to mime ludicrously convulted ideas of illicit and incestuous conduct on deck among the royal denizens, while folk gather with their cameras and binoculars, pretending they can see the Dukenborough and ole Big Ears. Today is definitively a  TFT day. A Time for Todd day on the push button cassette player, out in the sun. People had to hear this.I loved this song then and there and always in the sun rhapsodic. Saw Todd recently, he could no more sing this now than you could find a glimmer of the frenetic 60s sealife and communal hubbub on todays polluted Ballyholme beach. When I played it I moved away from our pack on the beach hut and an older, rougher  boy threw a plastic bag at the throng – missed – full of piss. “Go and get a wash you dirty punks,” he shouted, laughed and ran off. THIS is civilisation? Dont let me leave your lonely world.

6 Marvin Gaye Whats Going On
I was in the attic room having flying dreams now. Astral Weeks, Love and Forever Changes and this..This…song, whole album, like them other two ,a piece, a haunted rapture. Grapevine opened the way to this but that was a Ferryman tune – Marvin seemed reborn when I come got to this, sometime down the line, round punk. Not a contradiction or a problem; Motown, Trenchtown and the ramalama ding dong just all went together like onion carrot parsley and chicken bone in my mum’s stew. Funny, you read the respective (auto)biographies of Rotten and Marvin  and you find that they were in, some various ways, abused children. You can factor in how this might have affected the sensibility in their music. Regardless – the potency, tenderness and rightness of WGO just becomes more pronounced with each passing year, month, week, day.

7 Annaledoespoetry With Phil Manzanera
Hendrix

The scene moves into the future now. It is 2011 Dec 15, 1 day after  my 50th birthday and therefore 24 hours after  the movie by http://www.deanjohnsonmusic.co.uk/  called Behind NME lines : The Rock Writing Of Gavin Martin, Pt 1 : Metal Defective premieres on YouTube. I have for some days been bowled over by this act of love (and vengeance?) my  good Liverpudlian pal has created with the help of Serena Torz and actor Phil Gwilliam. I am wondering if I will ever be able to make out Phil’s accent. I guess some people are still thinking the same thing of me .
No matter – onward. When I was putting together a night on Jimi Hendrix for my Talking Musical Revolutions evening I could get no end of middle aged white guys to wax on JH. I needed someone black, young  and female and Mic Wright wired me off to all 3  - and oh SO much more –  in one beautiful person – annaleedoespoetry. When she did this , specially commissioned for the event, piece fellow performer Charlie Murray was standing beside Phil Manzanera (flabbergasting to me  if I’d had heard  it was Phil when Claire introduced us I’d a been much more nervous than I already was) .

Like everyone else in the room Phil was bowled away by Anna’s perspicacious, rhythmic realisation of Hendrix life and art. Charlie said Phil and her should record together. Since they met , at the subsequent Phil M featuring Talking Latin Musical Revolutions, they have been recording an album together. Tonight annale is gonna give me the cd. I’m nearly 50 and I’m excited.

Fiction...and Fact.