SUNSET ON A LEGEND,  
THE SAGA OF 
ALAN CLAYSON AND THE ARGONAUTS

A double-album retrospective by Damaged Goods (Cat. No.: DAMGOOD 257 CD)
As well as the tactile sensation of handling it, what I miss about the twelve-inch vinyl long-player is the ease with which you could read its sleeve notes. Therefore, because of complaints from those like me who need a magnifying glass to read the Sunset On A Legend booklet essay, the text is printed below. I have also seized the opportunity to correct a few errors and oversights.
There isn't sufficient space to relate more than the barest bones of the saga. Nevertheless, its central figures will surface as regularly as rocks in the stream in an eventual full-scale memoir of my peculiar career - partly because there are still people around today who'll tell you that (Alan) Clayson and the Argonauts - in which I was chief show-off - was the greatest group ever formed. Indeed, under certain conditions, I think so myself, but then I was its Danton, its Robespierre, it Mirabeau and its Bonaparte. Certainly, there'd never been a time or a situation -or a musical entity - like it.
Clayson and the Argonauts belong to an era nearly as bygone as that bracketed by Hitler's downfall and "Rock Around The Clock". We left the runway in 1976 after John Tobler wrote a glowing New Musical Express report on our set when we semi-gatecrashed a bill of pre-punk fare at Guildford Civic Hall. This was only a fortnight after we'd been hustled out of a palais in Reading at gunpoint. The promoter found our show so "rubbish" that he felt entitled not to pay us. On this threshold of eminence too, one key member was gaoled for fifteen months, and two others quit, one of them fated to co-produce Hilda Baker and Arthur Ballard's chartbusting duet of "You're The One That I Want", and the other to father one of Girls Aloud.
Generally, however, the wheels of the universe were rolling in our direction as the watershed year of 1977 loomed. Suddenly, there seemed to be some kind of future with no more hint of tragedy or farce. A few important media and music industry folk started flocking round like friendly if over-attentive wolfhounds, most conspicuously, Ron Watts, a godfather of punk, who had helped Malcolm McLaren launch The Sex Pistols. Thanks to Ron, we made a London debut at the 100 Club (with The Jam, both of us warming up for something called Stripjack) on 9 January 1977. Next up was a full-page Melody Maker spread, courtesy of its enthralled future editor, Allan Jones. Crucially, I was being spoken of and written about in the same sentences as Wreckless Eric, John Otway, Tom Robinson and Elvis Costello.
o began three years of expecting to be on Top Of The Pops next week. An almost overwhelming sweep of events embraced more dates than could possibly be kept; a BBC Radio One In Concert (which turned up on a 2001 Clayson bootleg, Ghostly Talking Heads), and headlining at venues such as the Marquee, back at the 100 Club, Amsterdam's Melkweg and any number of university hops, among them Queen's College Belfast at the height of the Troubles, where an ecstatic audience was still demanding more after no less than six encores. In parenthesis, what became The Eurythmics supported us at some college function in the Midlands.
Delivering "more than a performance, an experience" (Sounds), Clayson and the Argonauts were, therefore, a very "happening" group, judging too by the clusters chattering excitedly as they spilled out onto the pavements after a sweatbath with us inside, say, Hugh Wycombe's Nag's Head, Eric's in Liverpool, West London's Nashville Rooms, the Penthouse in Scarborough or the Exit in Rotterdam, always one week after Wreckless Eric and one week before The Adverts. En route, we were catalysts of the wreckage of a Luton auditorium; a near-lynching at Barbarella's in Birmingham; fisticuffs and a consequent car chase following a midnight matinee in Canning Town; a season in a red-light district sur le continent (our "Hamburg" period); a woman clambering on stage to tear off all her clothes at Islington's celebrated Hope-and-Anchor, and a bloke doing the same during almost-but-not-quite a riot at the Granary in Bristol.
Soon, we were past resistance to the circumstances that had made it impossible to go back to anyone's old life of get up-get to work-get home-get to bed security. If the van had drawn up outside a ball room on Pluto, it mightn't have seemed all that odd.
Yet fast must come the hour when fades the fairest flower. Furthermore, the underside of our marvellous achievements was that, though I was "in a premier position on rock's lunatic fringe" (Melody Maker again), I was running a provincial outfit most of the time from a telephone kiosk down the road. All I could promise an Argonauts fished principally from the same pool of local musicians, was an even more glorious tomorrow.
When it didn't dawn, our van mutated into a travelling asylum as ears strained to catch murmured conspiracy. A stoic cynicism would sour to cliff-hanging silences, sullen exchanges and the drip-drip of those antagonisms, discords and intrigues that make pop groups what they are. As we lurched from gig to gig, a rueful but light-hearted mood might persist for several miles before a tacit implication in an apparently innoucuous remark could spark off a slanging match that would continue on arrival in another strange city, another distant  soundcheck, another affirmation of a ramshackle grandeur. Back home, loved ones would wonder in that ancient night until headlamps signalled one more deliverance from the treadmill of the road. Yet there were still moments when...
That there was something not so much rotten but smelling funny in the state of Clayson and the Argonauts became evident firstly when "The Taster", a godawful one-shot single, was issued on Virgin Records against my better judgement, and damaging to both my confidence and credibility as a composer. Coupled with "Landwaster", an excerpt from a then-unreleased in-concert LP, it was a "turntable hit" (e.g. Number Three in Time Out, the London events guide's chart). Moreover, so I understood later, "Landwaster" entered Belgium's Top Twenty fleetingly after a pirate radio presenter began spinning it by mistake instead of the A-side.
This 45 was also a prelude to a voyage to a lower circle of hell for me and an Argonauts in gradually more constant flux. Nevertheless, there was always sufficient to feed hope, and I'd been famous enough to want to battle hard against being consigned back to the oblivion from whence I'd come.
In our decline, an Exeter-based independent label put out a rather eschatologically-titled EP, Last Respects, and an album, What A Difference A Decade Made, was a critical cause celebre, earning rave reviews in both Folk Roots (!) and The Observer.
However, to quote from Tony Hancock's suicide note, "things seemed to go wrong too many times". The morning after we played to a crowd of twelve back at the Nag's Head, I received an agitated call from our road manager to say that, while he was loading up, £500-worth of borrowed microphones had been stolen.
After just over a decade as a working band, Clayson and the Argonauts, our very name now a millstone round our necks, made a final public appearance on 20th January 1986. By then, we were like a soldier that had been fatally wounded, but kept fighting, not knowing how severe the injury was. To all intents and purposes, we'd been over for ages, a faded memory, a tattered newspaper cutting. Thus we scattered like vermin disturbed in a granary. All that was left - until now - was the sound of our aural junk-sculptures as a spooky drift from the shadows in some lonely back-of-beyond dance hall, maybe one refurbishment away from demolition...

Alan Clayson

(ALAN) CLAYSON AND THE ARGONAUTS DISCOGRAPHY

Single
Virgin VS215                            THE TASTER/LANDWASTER (1978)
                                                         EP
Rackets ARG36                        LAST RESPECTS (1984)
                                                     Vinyl LP
 
Butt BUTT 005                          WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DECADE MADE (1985)
                                              "Various artists" LPs
See For Miles SEE CD 430        BEAT MERCHANTS (includes "The Man Of The Moment",
                                                                                                                            1995)
Corridor (no catalogue number)    AIRS AND PLACES (includes "Pagan Mercia", 2000)
Hyped To Death 55                     MESSTHETICS #7: UK '78-82 (US-only, includes "Superman
                                                                                                                          '42, 2002)
To make the audio content of this package as entertaining as it is documentary, the selections are not presented in the order in which they were recorded. Besides, the story of Clayson and the Argonauts, both in the studio and on the boards, is a complicated and, frequently, messy one. Today, there are over sixty musicians with legitimate claims to have been Argonauts. Therefore, more useful than a track-after-track breakdown is a commentary on chronologically-arranged groups of items.
"The Rake's Progress" (1973, previously unreleased)
Voice: Alan Clayson; guitars: Mic Dover (solo) and Ross Fergusson; bass guitar: Clive Chandler; drums: Alan Barwise; backing vocals: Alan Barwise and Mic Dover.  Produced mostly by Alan Clayson versus Mic Dover
 
In 1971, at the age of twenty, I joined Turnpike, a folk-rock ensemble getting-it-together-in-the-country in Pond Cottage, Upper Basildon - not far from Traffic's more illustrious abode where Berkshire bleeds into Oxfordshire. Turnpike also contained future Argonauts Alan Barwise and Mic Dover. These two were also members of Billy and the Conquerors, a combo that I led as an escape valve from earnest Turnpike - as I did Average Joe and the Men In The Street, with whom Dover bashed drums 
  
Not much more than teenagers, Turnpike acquired but the merest renown in flashback when, though attributed to Clayson and the Argonauts, this circulated demo tape of my only composition for Turnpike was placed by John Tobler at Number Twenty-Eight in Zigzag magazine's "Fab Thirty" in 1977.
"Superman '42"^/"Rue Morgue"^* (suite), "Earthworms" (previously unreleased) and "Pagan Mercia"^ (1975)
Voice: Alan Clayson; guitars: Jonny Cranmer, Ross Fergusson, Andy Pegg, Alan Clayson and Pete Cox; keyboards: Robert Boughton and Alan Clayson; saxophones and flute: John Harries; bass guitar: Pete Cox, Garry Jones and Nick Oglethorpe; drums: Pete Cox; backing vocals: Robert Boughton, Alan Clayson, Pete Cox, Barbara Jones and, on "Earthworms", The Cemetary Junction Choir. 
Executive Producer: Martin Maynard
One summer afternoon in 1975, I pressed the doorbell of Reading's Audiogenic Studio, bearing a tape of "The Rake's Progress" and a head full of ideas. Martin Maynard  and Rob Boughton, the complex's directors, were sufficiently intrigued to allow me free time under the aegis of Pete Cox, the studio drummer and general factotum. One of his first acts was to suggest roping in certain players with whom he had worked. From these and parochial musicians known to me, Clayson and the Argonauts smouldered into form during off-peak sessions that usually commenced mid-evening, and finished, more often than not, in the grey of morning with Pete and I cudgelling a fiery-eyed and unshaven objectivity on, perhaps, degree of reverberation on a floor-tom as Martin or Rob laboured at the console.
"The Rake's Progress" (re-make, previously unreleased) and "Landwaster"*  (spring 1977)
Voice: Alan Clayson; guitars: Mic Dover; keyboards: Haydn Meddick; saxophones: John Harries; bass guitar: Sandy Monteith; drums: Alan Barwise; backing vocals: Mic Dover, Alan Barwise, Haydn Meddick and Sandy Monteith
Produced by Tony Satchell
These are from a demo session at London's Vineyard Studio by the group's best-remembered line-up, operational during our period of maximum commercial impact. It was supervised by our then-new co-manager, Tony Satchell.
In-concert album from thre Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London (14th August 1977, previously unreleased, except for "Landwaster")
Voice: Alan Clayson; guitar: Mic Dover; keyboards: Haydn Meddick; saxophone: Alan Whetton; bass guitar: Sandy Monteith; drums: Alan Barwise; backing vocals: Mic Dover, Alan Barwise and Haydn Meddick.
Produced by Tony Satchell
Instead of the expected maiden single, Tony Satchell and business partner Clive Stanhope decided that an atmospheric "live" album might make more sense.
      There is often much false bonhomie during such exercises - and a session at Vineyard was booked for "readjustments" to what we actually played on the night. Moreover the opening numbers - including an eye-stretching "Superman '42" - were erased. Nonetheless, the thunderous huzzas from an genuinely uproarious crowd are genuine, and, while sections of the continuity make my middle-aged self cringe slightly, there is a certain period charm about this flawed vista into this particular edition of Clayson and the Argonauts in its prime.
      Obviously, the intended vinyl LP was in two halves - which is reflected on this CD pressing.
"The Taster" (1978)
Voice: Alan Clayson; guitars: Mic Dover; keyboards: Tommy Eyre; saxophones: Alan Whetton; bass guitar: Sandy Monteith: drums: Alan Barwise; backing vocals: The Argotones.
Produced by Hugh Murphy and, as far as I'm concerned, Tony Satchell
This three-minute waste of time began as merely a recurring segue in an encore medley, but Clive and Tony - and Virgin's artists-and-repertoire department - were convinced that it was a chartbound sound. Thus we spent an overcast day down underground at Psarm Studio - famous as the source of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" - in London trying to hack a single from a lump of solid acetate.
      After a blaze and subsequent ministrations by the fire brigade damaged the master tape, it crossed my mind to stir up a rebelion against "The Taster", Virgin, Clive-and-Tony, Hugh Murphy - the producer foisted upon us - and everything else that I perceived was desecrating my self-picture as an artist and the Argonauts' now thoroughly road-drilled musicianship. Yet, in the death, we were too unsure of ourselves for open mutiny when, for instance, Murphy - fresh from a smash with Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" - replaced Haydn Meddick's triplets with those of Tommy Eyre, formerly one of both Dave Berry's Cruisers and Joe Cocker's Grease Band, and destined to be Wham!'s musical director.
"Sol Nova" "On The Waterfront"*, "Eleanor In Bondage"*, "Do The Zoot Bop!"*, "Lost In The Wilderness"*, "Days In Old Rotterdam"*^, "Searchlight"*, "Only For A Moment"*, "Soul Murder" (previously unreleased), "The Mechanic" (previously unreleaased), "Edwy The Fair"*, "Steer Straight!"* and "Crusader"* (1979-1986)
Voice: Alan Clayson; guitars: Pete Cox (solo on "Searchlight"), John Townsend (solo on "On The Waterfront") and Alan Clayson; keyboards: Martin Lawrie, Graham Hobbs (solos on "Do The Zoot Bop!" and "Steer Straight!"), Alan Clayson (solos on "Edwy The Fair", "On The Waterfront" and "Days In Old Rotterdam") and Pete Cox; bass guitar; Dave Parkington and Paul Tucker; drums: Pete Cox, Ken Stead and Graham Bartholemew; saxophones: Gary Noble, Ian Chamberlain and John Harries; trombone: Charlie Moran; trumpet: Hugh Fuller; violins: Drew Taylor; mouth-organ and "Sol Nova" taped sound effects: Alan Clayson; backing vocals: Pete Cox and The Apples Of Discord (Faith Brooker, Elizabeth Osman, Linde Ayling, John Dixon and others)
Produced by Pete Cox and Alan Clayson
Sniffing a perishable commodity, Virgin did not take up its option on further Alan Clayson and the Argonauts product, and we slipped into the "wilderness years" from which we never emerged. Yet this ghostly era of grinding up and down the motorway to mainly loss-making bookings, and over-ambitious attempts to fill theatres rather than clubs, spawned our finest music.
      This cost a fortune in all manner of studios, and still we couldn't get a hit to save our lives. Yet, without vanity, simple awareness of worth in the teeth of ill luck was enough reason to carry on until what had metamorphosed into a cumbersome big band (complete with horn section and choreographed chorale) had been pruned down instrumentally to two-guitars-bass-drums by the time we played our last engagement - as "special guests" of The Nashville Teens at the Half-Moon in Putney. Nevertheless, studio dates took place sporadically for several more years with whatever Argonauts were still around.
"The Mountains Of The Moon" (1987, previously unreleased)
Voice, keyboards and backing vocals: Alan Clayson; guitars and bass guitar John Townsend; drum programme: Martin Nichols
"Serenade To Alice" (1988, previously unreleased)
Voice, guitars, bass guitar and keyboards: Alan Clayson; drums: Chris Warman; backing vocals: Jill Myhill and Mandy Monkham
"Rebel Rocker" (1989, previously unreleased)
Voice and keyboards: Alan Clayson; guitars; John Townsend (solo) and Pete Cox; bass guitar: Paul Tucker; drums: Chris Warman
Produced by Alan Clayson
As autumn leaves fell on the Argonauts and I, among existing contracts to be honoured were two bookings with Dave Berry and the Cruisers. As far as I ever had boyhood heroes, he'sd been one of them after he burst from Sheffield into the mid-1960s charts, notably with "The Crying Game".
      Twenty or so years on, in a dressing room in Bath, Dave expressed interest in covering "On The Waterfront". There followed a "twinning" of our two groups when several more compositions - and one by John Townsend - were taped for a new Berry album, Hostage To The Beat, and the B-side to his revival of The Rolling Stones/Chris Farlowe's "Out Of Time".
      For a purpose that was then unspecific, I grafted my own lead vocals to the backing tracks of the latter opus ("Serenade To Alice") and "The Mountains Of The Moon", a highlight of Hostage To The Beat.
      "Rebel Rocker" was born of the same period as a demo for a possible follow-up to "Out Of Time".
"Run Kalwinder" and "The Landlocked Sailor" (precise date unknown, both previously unreleased)
Voice, keyboards and mouth-organ: Alan Clayson; guitars: Pete Cox; bass guitar: Garry Jones; drum programming: Mike Robinson; backing vocals: Garry Jones, Pete Cox and Alan Clayson; special assistance: Martin Nichols
Produced by Mike Robinson, Alan Clayson and Pete Cox
When Clayson and the Argonauts were on BBC Radio One's In Concert at the Corporation's Paris Studio in 1977, I became friends with the engineer, Mike Robinson, who was to be renowned in a wider world as the producer three years later of a British Number One for Splodgenessabounds. Around the turn of the next decade, he pulled strings to procure the sessions that resulted in these two items.
"The Man Of The Moment" (1995)
Voice and keyboards: Alan Clayson; guitars and bass guitar: John Townsend; drum programming: Martin NIchols; backing vocals: Elizabeth Coley and Alan Clayson
Produced by Alan Clayson
These days, I'm probably better known as an author, but a spin-off from my book, Beat Merchants (Cassell/Blandford, 1995) was a compilation album that kicked off with "The Man Of The Moment" (which rhymes ""Nashville Teens" and "Swinging Blue Jeans") by what was described on the CD booklet as "Alan Clayson and the Argonauts".
                                                                                                Alan Clayson
^ = from Last Respects      * = from What A Difference A Decade Made
 
The bulk - but far from all - of (Alan) Clayson and the Argonauts' recorded legacy has been selected for this retrospective.
 
All selections written and composed by Alan Clayson except "the Taster" by Wild Man Fischer,  "On The Street Where You Live" by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, "The Ham" by Charles Aznavour and George Garvarentz, "(Ghost) Riders In The Sky" by Stan Jones and Burl Ives, "Keep Cool" by Alan Clayson and the Argonauts, "Arnold Layne" by Syd Barrett, "Meet The Monster (Lord Rockingham Meets The Monster)" by Harry Robinson, "That Noise!" by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, "You Really Got Me" by Ray Davies, "Fur Elise" by Ludwig Van Beethoven arr. Alan Clayson and the Argonauts, "Anarchy In The UK" by Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Johnny Rotten, and "Hound Dog" by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It has not been possible to trace the composer(s) of "Delores (Dear Lori)".
All selections published by Beijing Music except "Serenade To Alice" (See For Miles); "Run Kalwinder", "The Landlocked Sailor", "Rebel Rocker", "Only The Outcasts", "Soul Murder", "Earthworms", "The Rake's Progress", "The Mechanic" and "The Man Of The Moment" (The Road Goes On Forever/Bug); "Keep Cool", "Delores (Dear Lori)" and "Fur Elise" (copyright control); "Hound Dog" and "The Taster" (Carlin); "Anarchy In The Uk" (Warner Brothers); "On The Street Where You Live" (Chappell); "Meet The Monster (Lord Rockingham Meets The Monster)" (Southern Music); "You Really Got Me" (Kassner); "The Ham" (Chappell/Britico); "That Noise!" (Concord Music) and "(Ghost) Riders In The Sky (Chappell/Morris).
Artwork: Garry Jones, Antoinette Earl and Andrew Robinson
Special thanks to:-
Ian Ballard, Dave Berry, Stuart Booth, Inese Clayson, Kevin Delaney, Bill Dixon, Tim Fagan, Paul Hearne, Nick Horne, Allan Jones, Brian Leafe, Simon Mayor, Martin Maynard, Deborah Mitchell, Martin NIchols, Percy Perrett, Oliver Reddaway, Charles Salt, Tony Satchell, Henry Smithson, Louis Spyrou, Clive Stanhope, Jane Stephens, the late John Stockwell, Steve Stone, Derrik Timms, John Tobler, Ron Watts, Pamela Wiggin and everyone who was ever in the Argonauts (or thought they were)
CD the first                                                     CD the second
1.SOL NOVA                                                  In concert at the Roundhouse, 1977
2. PAGAN MERCIA                                        1. LANDWASTER
3. THE MAN OF THE MOMEN                        2. DELORES
4. RUN KALWINDER                                      3. EARTHWORMS
5. THE LANDLOCKED SAILOR                       4.  ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE
6. SUPERMAN '42/RUE MORGUE                  5.  ONLY THE OUTCASTS
7. ELEANOR IN BONDAGE                            6.  THE HAM
8. REBEL ROCKER                                       7. KEEP COOL
9. DO THE ZOOT BOP!                                  8. GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY/MEET THE
10. LOST IN THE WILDERNESS                         MONSTER/ARNOLD LAYNE/THAT NOISE!
11. DAYS IN OLD ROTTERDAM                          (medley)
12. LANDWASTER                                         9. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS
13. ON THE WATERFRONT                            10. YOU REALLY GOT ME
14. SOUL MURDER                                        11. FUR ELISE/ANARCHY IN THE UK
15. EARTHWORMS                                              (medley)
16.  SEARCHLIGHT                                         12. HOUND DOG
17. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS                          ****************************************************
18. ONLY FOR A MOMENT                             13. THE TASTER
19. EDWY THE FAIR                                        14. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS (by Turnpike)
20. THE  MECHANIC                                       
                                                                               15. THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON
21. STEER STRAIGHT!                                     16.  SERENADE TO ALICE

 
copyright Alan Clayson