The Magic Bevis Muscle Frond

In the end, it didn't turn out to be Nick's first gig in a long time, as he had already played live with Psychos Mum a week or so earlier. Muscle played a short, rather loose set (due to lack of rehearsal time) that ended with Adrian blowing up his amp. The audience thought they were brilliant and even Nick had enjoyed himself on stage, apparently (it must've been the first time he'd ever gigged in a well-organised setting where nothing went wrong). For a while, Dave Barker of Glass Records seemed interested in Rod's songs and he contacted him on 19th September in order to discuss the possibility of a solo LP. On the 21st, Rod wrote and recorded "At the Oasis". A month later Magic Muscle (or Magic Frond, rather, on Ihis occasion) played at The Club Dog, with Rod starting off his birthday by singing "Heavy in E" at midnight.

Things seemed to have fallen well into place and our four musketeers (yup, I know it sounds corny, so what) decided to try and give it a go as The Magic Bevis Muscle Frond. They rehearsed with Bari Watts in the lineup, but there wasn't much chance of him going on stage with them, as he hadn't played in front of an audience since 1973. The set included much the same songs as before but during the encore Nick let rip with a frenzied solo that virtually blew everyone off their feet (he even admitted having come close to smashing his guitar!). There was a one-off gig in Grevenbroich, Germany (situated somewhere in the triangle Koln - Dusseldorf- Monchengladbach) on November 11th that went fabulously. They were even flown in from Heathrow for the occasion and met by their guide, Wolfgang, who accompanied them to their hotel to freshen up and then to the venue for a sound-check, all very professional. After the sound-check back it was to Wolfgang's apartment (which he shares with Volker, who used to be in a band himself, called Any And The Bodies; Rod found their album to be quite excellent). Before The Magic Bevis Muscle Frond went on, they were showing films onto a screen onstage (some of them were apparently banned and pretty shocking) and continued to do so (well, bits of them, anyway) when the band was on, in combination with the light show. According to Rod, it was "arty" but impressive stuff, and the boys in the band responded by playing one of their best ever sets (including the debut of "Radio Bloodbeast"). What they didn't know was that it was all being recorded for a bootleg LP. They did have the right equipment there, however, to record something much better than the "Death Trip" 10", so something must have gone wrong at one stage or other.

Rod enjoyed the gig tremendously, and so did everybody else in the band; it probably even made Nick want to carry on gigging, because at the time he did not really enjoy live work at all. So it's thank you again Grevenbroich (otherwise we might never had got to see Nick go on tour to Europe). They were also booked for the pre-New Year "Freakbeat Freakout" bash at a packed Fulham Greyhound on December 29th, with The Steppes and The Chemistry Set in support, psychedelically enlightened by Fruit Salad lights.

RR: "For me it was like starting all over again, from taking my first tentative steps back onstage again (at a local gig) back in 1985 to being in a bill-topping band just four years later No doubt had the local press bothered to report it they would have printed the "Rags To Riches" headline all over again, ha-ha! Whatever else was going on, the eighties had ended on an up for my musical endeavours and I just hope that the nineties end just as optimistically for me ... tho' 1990 itself will be a difficult one to top. It began with Chris and me building up the mail order side of the business, but I was also recording regularly at home".
As Rod mentioned, earlier that year, he and Christine had set up a little company of their own, called Rustic Reels, hoping to give record companies better access to their pile of reel-to-reel master tapes and thus put more "rustix produx" on the streets. One of their first customers was a new CD-label called SPM, operating out of Berlin, Germany, who took it upon themselves to press a CD of a tape of the Man band live at the Rainbow in 1972 (their first release, in fact).

Meanwhile, Rustic Rod the songwriter hadn't been idle: he'd written quite a number of songs, that came out via various channels: there was "Drongo Thief', for instance, the track that got aired by Huw Cower in the States; it was also to have been released on a Bucket-full Of Brains 7" EP but it didn't happen, probably as a result of the fall-out of all the legal poo-poo that had hit the ventilating system. "Rest Assured" was a song that came out as one of four tracks on POT 3, the third Ptolemaic Terrascope EP. (in January '90) and "Control" got its airing on the "Heroes Everyday" cassette, celebrating the 50th Acid Tapes release. Everybody was duly impressed with these, so the decision was taken to record an album's worth of Rod's songs. 1990 was kicked off by the Magic Bevis Muscle Frond doing a couple more gigs, like the first Boston Tea Party at the Boston Dome in Tufnell Park, London, for Sonic Relief, and then Nick received word of a projected European tour with Belgium's Foundation agency at the controls (Rod would probably like me to include a word of thanks here to Peter Verstraelen and (especially) Ton, so there you have it).