The Bevis Frond

On May 14th, Rustic Rod rose rather early, loaded the car, said goodbye to Chris and drove to London where the Bevis Frond had one rehearsal in the Wee Mee Nit Studio (founded by The Broughtons!) in preparation for their

European tour (if I'm not mistaken, this was Rod's first work outside the U.K. since White Rabbit days, going on 20 years earlier; life begins at forty indeed). The next night, Ton (their personal road manager) arrived from Belgium, and at 5 am (perish the thought) the next morning they were up and off to Dover to catch the 9.30 am ferry to Ostende. 

They had a terrible sound-check at the Lintfabriek (in Mortsel on the outskirts of Antwerp) or rather, they thought it was terrible but no one else in the audience did, and that’s including Marc and me (The Magic Mushroom was asked to entertain the guests before and after with some tasty morsels from the depths of their respective record collections) so it can't have been as horrendous as all that laddies. Apparently, only the sound through the stage monitors was crap. (RR: Well that’s what us musicians call terrible, when we can’t hear each other (or anything recognisable as music) just prior to playing the first gig of a tour)

I'm not going to go into any more detail regarding the niceties (and otherwise) of the tour, as Rustic Rod himself has already done so extensively (in Ptolemaic Terrascope vol.2 nr. 1, published in the autumn of 1990, when everything was still fresh in his memory) revealing in gross detail all the sordid goings-on behind the scenes. Let it suffice for me to say that they played Belgium, Holland, Germany and Italy, topping it all off (after the ritual end-of-tour party, in Biseglia Di Pine, where they blew every fuse in the house) with a 1200 km marathon drive through Northern Italy, Austria, Germany, Holland and into Belgium. Back in London on May 4th, unloading at Nick’s around 7 pm; "car starts almost first time - a miracle to end the tour with".

Rod was back home in Calne May 5th, having played 17 gigs in 18 days and travelled thousands and thousands of miles, in five different countries. At home there were piles of mail-order letters waiting for him, the sleeve notes for "Laughs And Thrills" to finish and the deal for that CD (with SPM) to complete; Claus at SPM has a DAT tape of The Bevis Frond Band playing live in Berlin for future release on his label but due to several problems it’ll probably not materialise. On May 15th, Nick Saloman arrived in Calne with the finished test pressings of "Ethereal Counterbalance" and a camera. He took a few photos, one of which turned up as the shot on the back of the album's sleeve: the Doctor's Pond, a pond in CaIne near which Joseph Priestly used to live; it's said that the idea of proving the existence of oxygen occurred to him there, although he later officially discovered it in a laboratory on CaIne's Bowood Estate, Since Rod had not only written a song about the spot but had also been in a band named after it, he thought it only fitting to picture it on his debut solo LP (of which only 1,000 were pressed by Woronzow, with a second pressing of 500 copies due to “unprecedented demand”)

By mid-1990 Rod's mail-order service of Muscle Material that had developed out of the Rustic Reels thing was starting to grow; it would eventually develop into a full-time business, to keep the Goodway family fed and clothed when Rustic Rod was off the road or otherwise temporarily unemployed by the music biz. This of course took up a lot of time (Rod declares he had somewhat of a hard time with it as he felt this was not really him and he was longing to get back out on the road again) but he managed to play a few gigs nonetheless.

On July 2nd The Bevis Frond Band played the Boston Dome again. After that, word came in about a possible gig in Denmark (one-off like the one in Grevenbroich - I still think it's kind of a weird name) that would have the bonus of being an open air festival. Before that, however, there was an Alehouse reunion (with Dave Gregory of XTC and the other original members) on July 14th. Then The Frond did another gig in London (at the Brixton Academy) at a 12 hour Hawkwind bash on August 1st, and a week and a half later, the Denmark thing materialised; it was held in Copenhagen, in the Faelled Parken, on August 11th, 1990 and was recorded for posterity. Top of the bill was The Hothouse Flowers and our boys were second on the bill, so they played to about 20,000 people (and they were flown in from London specially -regular rock stars). Four of the recorded tracks appeared on the Bevis Frond Earsong 12" later that year, including the increasingly bizarre "Radio Bloodbeast” (which I immodestly like to think of as dedicated to The Magic Mushroom). And then of course, there was September 6th, 1990, a Thursday evening, when Rod was contacted by the inimitable Marc Muijen of The Magic Mushroom, to add some live comments (by telephone) to the first official Belgian presentation of the "Ethereal Counterbalance" album. There were other events and gigs, of course, but no records were kept of those, and Rustic Rod's memory does tend to look like Emmenthal cheese every once in a while.  (RR: Actually I think it’s amazing all things considered!)