Solid Air by Chris Nickson

Author:Chris Nickson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Creative Content Ltd

CHAPTER EIGHT – Strange Times

John’s contract with Warner Brothers had been for two albums – and he’d delivered them. They’d both done very well for John and the label. So why didn’t John stick with the company?

In part it could have stemmed from the fact that he’d decided to split with his manager, whom he accused of “sharp practice.” Like many of John’s partings, it wasn’t amicable. There were injunctions against John, by his own reports, which meant “I couldn’t work and that sort of stuff, it was a bit of a pain...”

Legal problems could scare labels away even from good-selling artists and, at the same time, prevent artists from being able to sign new contracts. That left John in a terrifying limbo. He couldn’t go with a label that would be able to give him an advance and he didn’t have the money to take a band on the road.

His choices were limited, to say the least. He did take the band on the road, but not on a full tour – that simply wasn’t economically feasible. Since rehearsal time was necessarily limited, he injected a solo set into the middle of performances. That helped satisfy older fans, although it didn’t sit well with John. For a brief foray to North America he did travel alone, playing New York’s Bottom Line for the first time. Toward the end of the year, he was going out with Alan Thomson covering bass and synth and Jeff Allen on drums – a stripped-down version of the band sound that put more pressure on John himself.

By virtue of taping some of the full band shows in 1982, in addition to a London gig in 1983, he was at least able to cobble together material for an LP, his second live album – one drastically different from the first.

Philentropy (the word isn’t to be found on dictionary.com) arrived in November 1983 on John’s own Body Swerve label (the name comes from a Glaswegian expression meaning “ to avoid an unpleasant situation”). This time, however, he wasn’t marketing it from home, having learned the lessons of Live at Leeds; instead it was distributed and marketed in the normal way, although with virtually no publicity, for the plain fact that he couldn’t afford it; he’d put all his money into the making of the record.

The tracks were recorded at gigs in Oxford and Brighton in October 1982, featuring ex-Stone the Crows member Ronnie Leahy on keyboards, and at a London gig in the spring of 1983, with an unnamed keyboard player. There have been claims that the London tracks were actually recorded in a studio and the audience added later, but John refuted this (and from the performances themselves, there’s no reason to doubt him). On the other hand, studio overdubs were done – to what extent he never said, and the supposed London gig where the recordings were made isn’t mentioned on the sleeve, unlike the other two shows.

For all John seemed to be moving

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