The Boy Who Looked at the Moon by David Evans

Author:David Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tusitala Press
Published: 1995-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

ALUN DAVIES: “I don’t know if you remember but I started off as a gardener working in Cannizaro Park in Wimbledon. You learned a lot in those days from the older gardeners. Things like pleaching … Pleaching limes, planes; trees like that. Pleaching is basically pollarding except you remove all the upward-shooting growth the tree has made in the previous season and just retain wands that you can bend and shape horizontally, running them into similar growth which you’ve trained from a neighbouring tree to make a walkway, an umbrella … Make them look as though they’re growing seamlessly into each other.

Then I started to train to be a teacher. Val and I got married and had Rebecca. She must have been about two and a half and Abigail only just about to be born when I first met Steve.

I was still at college but doing the odd session when I found myself at the BBC working on a programme with Jeremy Taylor, the South African singer and guitarist. The programme’s music was being overseen by Paul Samwell-Smith. He told me that he’d got a meeting set up with Cat Stevens which Chris Blackwell at Island had suggested. Would I like to come along?

The meeting was to be at Rosie’s, Paul’s girlfriend’s, flat in West Hampstead and so I went along. I have to say that I wasn’t entirely happy. All I remembered of Steve was of him as the pop star and the only visual images I retained, which made me shudder when I thought of them, were of him in some terrible white suit singing I’M GONNA GET ME A GUN and then another daft press story where he’s driving round the West End in a sports car with a dolly bird on the bonnet drinking champagne.

I suppose I must have taken my guitar along to the meeting although I can’t remember playing anything. All I can remember is having every illusion shattered about the man about whom I’d been so badly predisposed. Steve played dozens of songs that day, wonderful songs. He must have written his heart out in that year whilst he was both ill and convalescing and they just flowed out of him in, one huge outpouring of deeply felt poetry.

I heard songs that day that I would be hearing for the next four years. All the songs on those first four albums were contained in that mini-concert Steve gave that afternoon in Rosie’s flat. It was a huge pool of material and every one of them a winner. It was as though Steve had stumbled out of a long lightless tunnel and emerged having come across a treasure trove, almost a bequest from destiny.

I can honestly say that I never had any doubt from that moment on, especially when we started recording the songs Steve and Paul had selected to be included on MONA BONE JAKON, that he was going to be anything else but enormously successful. You get to be able to recognise that something special and Steve had it.

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