Tucker's Luck

or What Happens After School

Hello, Subscribers!

Welcome to From the Devil’s Coach House. A big welcome to all my new subscribers, and a huge thank you to everyone who has tuned in, again.

I have some recent new subscribers from the small village where I now live, donc, j'aimerais aussi souhaiter la bienvenue à ces gens.

My titles are probably getting a bit niche at this point, but Tucker’s Luck was a TV show of my youth that followed the adventures of Tucker Jenkins, an incredibly popular character from another show about the worst school in the UK entitled Grange Hill. Even though I may be a gentleman on the more *ahem* mature side, I felt something of an affinity to this character when launching into the world of business and employment in France.

L’histoire, Part I

Way back before going to college to learn French, as soon as things started opening up in France after the lockdown, or le confinement, I immediately started to immerse myself in French musical life. One of the places I did this was a music venue called La Grande Ourse, or The Great Bear. At first, I would work there assisting the house sound engineers, but later I was employed to mix live sound for some of the concerts.

Doing live sound for Mike Wheeler and band at La Grande Ourse

One of the gigs I mixed was Mike Wheeler, who is a fantastic guitarist and singer from Chicago. Like many of the artists who play La Grande Ourse, Mike Wheeler has played with many Blues legends, such as Buddy Guy, and it was a great honour to try and do him justice at the mixing desk. You can check him out, below.

This summer, after one of the concerts, a colleague asked if I was planning to become “intermittent” and I, of course, said yes. Intermittent is a status that, as far as I know, only exists in France and is achievable for artists and technicians who work in live performance. Essentially, if you hold the status of intermittent, the state will make up your average wage for any months you are out of work. To get the status, you have to do a certain numbers of hours a year as a professional. It’s quite a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. As you can imagine, for a musician and live sound engineer, this is a heck of a deal.

Not long after this, I got a call from a French company who do lighting and sound for music festivals in France, offering me work for the summer. I had been recommended to them by the same colleague from La Grande Ourse. As the recording studio was still under construction, I took the job, as I thought it would be a great way to start adding up hours towards intermittent status and also to improve my French.

I won’t say the work wasn’t hard - it really was - but I made some great friends and got to hear lots of great music. If you want to read about one of the festivals, you can link to it here.

The team for Saint-Loup festival

Currently, I have the recording room of my recording studio up and running. I mix and master there in the evening, while the artisans work on the new live room in the daytime. This arrangement has left me with a bit of time to work for another company during regular work hours, which, again, helps me develop my French, but also brings in extra money to help me finance the studio build. The company I work for provides backline (drums, amplifiers, guitars, synthesisers, etc.) for festivals and concerts all over Brittany. Again, the work is quite hard, but I get to travel to dozens of music venues and to make a lot of new contacts. Most importantly, my French language skills have developed exponentially since starting work there.

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to stumble on a gig that really interested me. A colleague at the backline company had forgotten to pick up a couple of amplifiers at a venue, so I drove over to pick them up. Normally, I would come and go via the loading bay, but this particular venue was doing a live recording when I arrived, so I went in by the front entrance. I was pretty surprised to see a poster for Napalm Death on the main doors. I wasn’t going to miss that gig!

If you don’t know Napalm Death, then let me tell you a story…

The Madeleine

Back when I was a sixth form student (16-18 years) in the *ahem* late 1980s, I was Heavy Metal crazy, and so were most of my friends. In those days, the North West of England was in thrall with The Smiths, The Inspiral Carpets, The Happy Mondays etc., so there weren’t very many Metal gigs in the ‘metropolis’ of Wigan. However, as I discussed in a previous edition, we did have plenty of great Punk gigs.

These Punk gigs were attended by a loyal group of metalheads, as the music felt closely related to the fast and frenzied Thrash Metal that we loved. So, occasionally, the promotors would throw us a bone and book a Metal band. One band they booked around 1988/89 was the, at the time, underground Grindcore (I’m not sure if that term had even been coined then) band Napalm Death. All we knew about Napalm Death back then was that the NME (New Musical Express) had dubbed them The Fastest Band in the World. Oh, yeah, that sold us on that gig!

Napalm Death on the cover of NME

Rather than at The Den, Napalm Death was booked to play at Unity, which was a Punk night held at a cricket club owned by a gent named William, whose big claim to fame was that he had booked The Beatles to play the ABC in Wigan in 1964.

I’m not sure what we were expecting - probably a slightly faster Slayer - but, when Napalm Death hit the stage, we really didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t just faster and more extreme than the Thrash Metal and Hardcore Punk we were listening to; it was something different altogether. Maybe this doesn’t sound too extreme now, but when we experienced this particular version of Napalm Death with Bill Steer (guitar), Mick Harris (drums), Lee Dorrian (vocals) and Shane Embury (bass), it blew our minds.

Around this time, Metal was largely ignored by mainstream media in the UK. There was The Power Hour on MTV in the early hours and The Friday Rock Show with Tommy Vance. John Peel did champion some bands like Napalm Death and Carcass, but it was slim pickings.

However, with the BBC Arena documentary about the “much maligned and misunderstood” music of Heavy Metal, everything changed.

Napalm Death were featured in this documentary and achieved a huge amount of fame and notoriety. Sadly, this wasn’t because the mainstream learnt to respect what they did, but because they became a kind of novelty group.

I guess we can forgive the mainstream for thinking Napalm Death was a joke, especially when they (arguably) hold the record for the shortest ever single.

Napalm Death’s line-up has changed a lot since this period. In fact, only Shane Embury remains from this classic team. Thankfully, despite continuing to make extreme music, they managed to shake off the “joke band” association and go on to become legends of the genre.

L’histoire, Part II

I had a really great time watching Napalm Death at the weekend. The group now comprises Shane Embury (bass), Mitch Harris (guitar) and Barney Greenway (vocals). In some ways, this line-up is very different. Their sound is much more Death Metal than Grindcore - and Barney’s vocals are less extreme - but they still make a great sound.

In many ways, I find Barney’s performances almost like Extreme Metal’s equivalent of Ian Curtis. He seems to take himself to another place that doesn’t look at all comfortable or pleasant.

At this weekend’s gig, poor old Barney had broken his ankle and had to be helped onstage to sit in a chair for the whole set. However, I’m happy to say, none of the intensity of his performance was lost. It was a fantastic show!

Point of No Return

Thanks for tuning in to my mental meanderings, again. I hope you are enjoying sharing this journey with me and the memories it stirs up in the muddy corners of my mind. Please let me know in the comments if you liked it, or if there is anything else you’d like to know more about.

Stay noisy!

Steve