Brian Eno sang "Blank Frank is the messenger of your doom and your destruction". I might be blank but my name's not Frank. Fact. Last night I smelled a rat, there was something fishy going on. I could feel that someone was trying to have a laugh at the poor redundant (!?!) Rev. Dr's. expense, not a good thing to do, believe you me. I was told at 7am on Moday morning 16.3.09 by Keith Masters, General Manager of the Royal Terrace Hotel (17-21 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh), that the position of Night Manager was being made redundant; I had been doing that job at that hotel for nearly a year. I received a letter on 17.3.09 confirming this. Fact. As the fumes from the boiling vat of fish juice wafted beneath my quivering nostrils I thought I would do a little bit of the old Sherlock, my dear what's on. I phoned the hotel at 1am using a false voice I borrowed from an angry Aberdonian called Ian McGregor and made enquiries. I was told by Martin Kopriva (the complete idiot I had to train to replace me) that he was the night manager. Fact. I then sent a text to Gerry, the lazy portly porter, which said 'are you working tonight?', he replied 'yes with Martin', I texted back 'is he Night Manager?'. I could feel a palpable dull thud as the shit hit the wall of his skullduggery, he still has not replied and this silence speaks volumes. At 8.55am I sent a further message to Gerry saying 'What's up porky has the cat got yer tongue?'. Fact. I like facts, in a situation like this they are nice things to have around. They can be on your side or against you or neutral but they are there. Fact. So now I have an incriminating body of evidence against these clever bastards. What to do with it, I wonder? Give it to the law I say. That's what the law is there for, to protect people like me from wrong-doers who think that they are above the law. As Discharge sang - " The nightmare continues". Or is it a lucid dream...

and it came to pass

that on the morning of monday 16th march 2009 the rev moller was duly fired from his position in an un-named scottish hotel.

for this reason we are introducing a period of solitude and reflection whilst the good reverend puts in a few windows and accepts the consequences.

we will return soon, dont go away, we never did.
mr rudeforth

This is a compilation from three rehearsals on 30.7, 24.9 and 25.10 1987. The line up was Paul Moller - Guitar, Vocals, Mr Rudeforth - Radio, Jonathan/Cess - Radio, Electronics, Mike - Bass, Ian - Drums. I can't remember Mike or Ians' surnames but they had been in a band with Unka and Gary who had no singer but a worked-out set of tunes which begged for vocals. Mike was really a guitarist. I got them to lend me a tape and worked out some rough themes to improvise some vocals to their instrumentals which were songs without words, even though I wasn't really a singer. I did a couple of gigs with them. Then they split-up and Mike and Ian joined us for a while. I was going through a strange time and drinking a lot so I don't have great memories of this period. I remember reading something in the newspaper about if a black person was seen in Wilmslow after dark they were arrested because they were obviously up to no good and this shocked me. It felt to me at the time that we had taken things as far as they could go in terms of manic speed and had hit a brick wall. At the last rehearsal I was a drunken mess and there was an enormous sparkly mirror in the room which I smashed at the end of the session. I had been practicing acoustic blues and trying to learn how to sing all through this and it was time for a change...

The tracks are:-

1. Driving Me Crazy - 30.7.87
2. Drunk In Wilmslow Blues - 30.7.87
3. Loose - 24.9.87
4. Drunk In Wilmslow Blues - 24.9.87
5. Interference - 25.10.87

http://archive.org/details/DrunkInWilmslowBlues

Ian Craven R.I.P.

This was recorded one evening when Ian came to visit sometime in early 1986, we would probably have had a smoke and then decided to improvise this. It is here as my tribute to Ian. We are both messing with stringed instruments and that part is not so good but I thought it worthy of posterity for Ians' vocal contribution. I add some sound from the t.v. at a few points. There never was a part 2. On a lot of the Riverside stuff Ian mentions "Pussy down the well" from a childrens' nursery rhyme. I recently had a discussion with my girlfriend about how deep and intense I can be at times and she said that she wasn't scared to go down the well with me. Ian wasn't scared either.

http://archive.org/details/PreparationsForTheExternalCircusPartOne

So, we come to week 23, the final week of The Riverside Sessions and it finds us in good form apart from Mr. Rudeforth who had a slight touch of death and is nowhere to be found or heard here. Ian Craven had settled in and his confidence was brimming over, he was impatient to start hence the "Get on with it" at the beginning. The date is 1.11.85 and we did one gig a couple of weeks after this and then it all fell apart. The gig was ok but the vocals are not very loud on the tape and this spoils it for me.

http://archive.org/details/UfosInYourCornflakes

The penultimate week of The Riverside Sessions. There is about 10 minutes on the cassette that is slightly phased/muffled but I used it all for the sake of completion and the sound rights itself after a while. Here is week 22 in all its' ragged glory, to continue to tell the story of those riverside daze.

http://archive.org/details/TheEndOfNothing

I could not find anything on week 20 that I thought was worth using so here we go on to week 21 of The Riverside Sessions and it's very powerful stuff with the overwhelming fumes of the midget gem. For those who don't know, midget gems were an incredibly powerful, overwhelming psychoactive drug with an immediate effect, disguised as a chewy fruit sweet. Listen as Ian Craven and I are transformed by the first taste of the gem and moved to declare potent feelings for this tiny transport of delight! Lovely.

http://archive.org/details/MidgetGems

1996 - 2007

I moved from Hull in 1998 to a small seaside town in North Yorkshire called Whitby. On the first night (Wednesday) I went to the folk club run by Mick Haywood, having got to know him from numerous previous visits, he greeted me with "welcome home" and it felt like it for a long while. On the Friday he knocked on the door and took me on a pub crawl to introduce me to parts of the town I didn't know. I used to play at the folk club and in various local pubs and did some busking. I was teaching myself fingerpicking, something I had never been able to get to grips with but was determined to learn. I was working in the pub one night when a guy called Barry Whiteland walked in, he was a guitar-teacher and window-cleaner from Middlesborough just come to live in Whitby and commute, he was an ace guitarist specialising in fingerpicking. We started a blues night which ran for about a year and a half. During Folk-Week one year we held our blues night in the Black Horse as usual with the words 'Blues On - Folk Off', the folkies were horrified and at the end of the night some members of the Wilson family ran in, sang a quick bit of folk music then ran out again! Barry was also a really good fisherman and had a secret bait we used to call 'Barrys' Secret Bait'. He taught me lots of good fingerpicking stuff but had a problem with shaky hands cos he was fond of whisky. At some point in 2001 I was smoking a joint and listening to The Beta Band - 3 EPs, something happened and What Katy Did Next was born again in my head. I started to slowly collect some equipment but it was a long time coming to fruition due to the fact that I had a serious breakdown in 2002 and another one a year later in 2003, a couple of months after having to go bankrupt. I slowly recovered, helped in 2004/05 by meeting The Geezer and smoking vast amounts of weed. In 2006 I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland.

I came across this photo of the entrance to Ye Olde Blue Bell Inn and tried to clean-up the cassette tape of our gig there on 17.5.88 as best I could. The sound was very thin with lots of audience noise but I beefed it up a bit and thought it was worth sharing cos it's quite atmospheric and the only representation of us live in 1988. The other live tape from a month or so later only has one channel and is unusable, it was recorded upstairs at The Haworth Arms, a bigger room and audience. I got pissed-off by the level of noise and said "If you've just come to talk you might as well go back downstairs", we lost half the audience there and then. The Blue Bell was a great venue, an upstairs room which we arranged to use once a month with the idea of building up a regular audience and trying out different stuff. The day after the gig , the cleaners found evidence of much use of 'wacky-baccy' in ashtrays etc and that was the end of that. We had a couple of friends on the door collecting money, one of whom, Howard, spent most of the evening throwing his knife into the wooden floor; we didn't need to charge much money but half the audience got in for nothing anyway. The line-up was Paul Moller - Guitar, Vocals, Trevor Simpson - Guitar, Mr. Rudeforth - Tapes, Radio, and Gary Burroughs - Bass Drum, Snare Drum with brushes.

The tracks are:-

1. Mystery Train.
2. Death Of M.F.
3. Dead And Gone.
4. Launderette Love.
5. Frisco Train.
6. Dead Flowers.
7. This Ambulance.
8. Me And My Chauffeur.
9. King Alcohol.
10. Poor Boy.
11. Bobs' Blues.

http://archive.org/details/LiveAtTheBlueBellInn1988

This is where the story really begins. I found this via google one day towards the end of December 2007, I was supposed to be lost but I knew where I was, by coincidence Cheryl (a great friend and life-saver) got in touch and I contacted Mr. Rudeforth about his vacuum cleaner abilities, or lack of. Someone once told him they had seen him playing the vacuum cleaner onstage, he is scrupulously clean I am assured but they were sadly mistaken over the glorious sound of his hoover music. This is a compilation that Mr. Rudeforth did of The Riverside Sessions and I have tried to avoid using most of the bits on it when compiling my version of the sessions. The people in the photo are looking for something but no-one knows what.

http://archive.org/details/whatkatydidnextsomebodypullthechain