Text by Paul Thompson
Manichae began life as a collaboration between Andy MacDonald and myself in late 1997.
We were working together, and had a certain amount of overlapping music
taste. We had also pretty much given up on the then current rock
music scene. Nobody seemed to be making the kind of music that we
wanted to hear any more. Since we were both guitarists, the
obvious thing was to make some music ourselves.
This was easier said than done. Andi (as he then spelt his name)
lived with his girlfriend in Thorneywood, Nottingham, and I lived with
my mum and brother Andy in
Sutton-in-Ashfield, in North Nottinghamshire. Neither of us had
cars. I'd never had any trouble about noise from the neighbours,
whereas Andi lived on an estate where his neighbours would soon
complain if he had a couple of guitar amps blaring out. My
equipment was much too cumbersome to get on public transport, so the
logical venue for playing together was my house. The first
arrangement we made was for me to borrow an amp for a weekend from a
guitar shop I frequented (Hardy Smith Music, to this day my chief
supplier of guitars), and for Andi to hop on the bus to my house, and
stay for the weekend.
A girl we used to work with had spotted Andi "and his poncy blue
guitar" (for Andi didn't have a case) walking to his bus stop, and so
his guitar was christened. The poncy blue guitar was a Charvette
superstrat, and I had a Fender Jap Strat, a double-necked
Epiphone G-1275, a Tanglewood Les Paul copy, and a Hohner
acoustic which was rarely played. My main guitar was an Epiphone
SG - a really nice guitar to hear and to play.
Once we'd got our equipment set up, and we'd each trotted out some
riffs that we knew, we started to blast through some Metallica
standards ("Harvester of Sorrow" and "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" were
favourites). Once we'd got bored with that, we started to jam
some bits and pieces of music together, usually with a tape recorder on
the floor to document anything we liked.
Two motifs came from that session: "Terror from the Crate" and
something that we've both since forgotten. Attempts have been
made to find the tape which we recorded that piece on, but with no
success. "Terror from the Crate" was the name of a feature in an
Elvira pinball machine that we'd been playing on a few weeks
before in a pub called Byron's in Nottingham (long since pulled down -
the area it stood in is now a car park). We used that because the
amplifier that I'd borrowed from Hardy Smith was a Crate. At the
time of writing, "Terror from the Crate" still forms a part of
Manichae's live repertoire.
We had a couple more jamming sessions in Sutton over a while, following
a similar pattern. I can't remember anything else which came out
of those sessions which has stood the test of time. The main
outcome of them, apart from "Terror from the Crate", was a realisation
that Andi and I could write music together, and take it seriously
enough to move forwards with it.
In the middle of 1998, my brother and I had a silly falling out with my mum, and we upped sticks to Nottingham.
Andy and I rented an end-terrace house
on Gawthorne Street, New Basford. It was next door to impossible
to heat, and it wasn't terribly big. I set up my gear in my
bedroom, and Andi and I played much more frequently now. The
seeds of several Manichae songs came from those sessions:
"Forgiveness", "Fleeing from the Memory" (the name only was kept) and
"The Last Breath". We wrote a mass of material together,
recording most of our work on the trusty mono tape recorder. Some
items were repeated only once or twice, but some ideas we worked hard
at. "Deutschporn" was one such opus. Born from a spooky
flanged intro, and augmented by Andi putting some strange pick effects
and tremolo dives through a cheap and nasty phaser pedal I lent (and
later sold) him. On one occasion, the harmonics produced from the
combination of these caused the entire room to shake, and my then
fiancee Sue (now wife), who was dyeing her hair in the bathroom next
door complained of alarming vibrations from the bathtub! We
played loud, and for long periods of time, puncuated by the odd smoke
break, or to listen back to the tapes.
Sometimes, visiting friends would join in. A guy I went to school
with, Ernie Goddard, lent me his bass for a while. Andi had an
extra input on his guitar amp, so we'd put the bass through that.
Another old school friend of mine, John Wright, used to come up from
Birmingham occasionally, and play bass with us. We'd go through
some ideas, and record them with bass. Ernie joined in on bass
for one piece, named after the label on a cardboard fruit box which was
on top of a wardrobe - "Mandora (My Life as an Orange)". After
taking an extraordinary amount of abuse, Andi's amp packed up under the
strain of blasting out bass as well as guitar.
Visiting friends could also be useful for song ideas. One
untitled piece of music became known as "Beat the Fucker with a Breaker
Bar", which handily fitted the rhythm of the song nicely. There
were more lurid versions on the same theme which fortunately haven't
survived into print!
I had a Yamaha four-track recorder which we used to record a version of
"Terror from the Crate". This recording survives (in digital
form), along with digital transfers of all the cassettes we recorded,
except for one of them (of which more anon).
We talked about getting other members into the band, but nothing came
of it. We met outside of the jam sessions in pubs (the "Dog and
Partridge" on Parliament Street was useful, as Andi's bus stop was
right near it), and we'd scrape together some lyrics (which have never
been used). We would get together at Andi's house and design
logos on paper for the band. We called ourselves "Nemo", in lieu
of a real name, my idea of "Bishops of the North" having been rejected.
But would we ever get anywhere?
In January 2000, disaster struck.
The house at Gawthorne Street was robbed. All my electric guitars
and Andi's poncy blue guitar were taken. Fortunately, my acoustic
had been left, so we had something to go on. We wrote an
atmospheric piece called "Fate of the Brethren" on my computer, which
the thieves had, amazingly, not stolen, despite using it as a step to
get back out of the window! Also, a western-influenced
instrumental called "The Stranger" was written on the guitar.
A positive result of the burglary was that Sue and I moved up to
Daybrook, a pleasant suburb in the northern part of Nottingham, near
Arnold. This house was a mid-terrace, so we had to be a bit more
careful with the noise. Andi recruited me for two guitar and amp
replacement (stolen and burned out, respectively) sessions at Hardy
Smith, where Andi bought himself an Epiphone SG a bit like my old
one. His amp he picked up at a music shop called "Doug's Cabin"
at Sutton Junction. I had bought my first real amp (a Marshall
Valvestate 100W head and cab) at Doug's, and I knew that Doug was
always useful for a good selection of Marshall amps.
Equipped with one electric guitar, one acoustic guitar and a MIDI
package on my computer, we went to work, albeit less frequently,
writing a few bits and pieces at my new gaff, still with the trusty
Sony mono tape recorder from our earliest days. There was one
piece in particular that we enjoyed listening back to - I was bashing
insanely on my keyboard to produce a manic drum beat, whilst Andi
soloed like a man possessed.
Andi managed to talk me into another trip to Doug's, when he was
looking for a second guitar to go with his SG. I spotted an
unusually coloured second hand Epiphone Les Paul, but couldn't afford
the £260 asking price. Andi, in one of his persuasive
moments, promptly lent me the money, to be repaid once I'd been paid
the next month. Andi can be such a nice chap at times! Andi
bought himself a nice midnight blue Jackson superstrat, as he was
missing that style of guitar.
Now we had other problems. One of my neighbours was a curious
fellow, pleasant enough one moment, but ready to fly into a rage at the
slightest (and often imagined) provocation. By his own admission,
he was missing a few cards from the pack. We didn't really have
anything to do with him, until one night, shortly before Sue and I got
married, when he had had his van broken into and some thousand pounds'
worth of tools pinched. This, coupled with Andi and I making a
racket with two electric guitars, tipped him over the edge. He
appeared at the door, raging at Sue, who had unfortunately heard the
door bell. Sue withstood his anger, closed the door, and came up
the stairs to inform us. I immediately went round to apologise,
which made matters worse. He was tending towards violent language
when I gave up trying to communicate with him and came indoors.
That put the tin lid on any writing we could do!
A couple of weeks later, he ran into me in the Old Spot, a pub round
the corner from us, where I had arranged to meet various people who
were participating in our wedding rehearsal in the church over the
road. He said his piece, I said mine and we had got to some
degree of reason about the issue, which we agreed to drop.
However, we didn't feel that we could continue the guitar sessions and
risk him being abusive to us and ours again.
Andi found a cheap rehearsal studio
complex (via a colleague of his, if my memory serves), and we started
fortnightly practices there. This involved quite a lot of going
over old ideas, but at much higher volume! Now that we were in a
slightly wider arena, our thoughts turned once more to recruiting some
other members. Andi placed an ad on a few "musicians wanted"
boards on the web. For quite some time, we had little or no
serious response to our ad, which was frustrating.
We were in the habit in those days of meeting every Saturday lunchtime
at the Tap and Tumbler, Nottingham's rather dubious rock pub.
There were a few of us who would turn up, and we would have a meal, the
girls would then go shopping, and the boys would drink the afternoon
away. This formed an ideal way of meeting prospective band
members prior to jamming with them. We had one vocalist who
arranged to meet us, but didn't turn up. We later received a
message saying that he had some family problems, but this wasn't very
convincing. Eventually we struck lucky, and Andrew Oliver walked
into the pub, having arranged to meet us there.
Andrew was a fairly cheeky, sarcastic export from Consett, County Durham. He'd knocked around, playing bass, in a band or two, both in the UK and in France, where he had worked for a while, teaching French children how to speak English in a Geordie accent. We agreed to give him a tape, again at the Tap, a few days after the initial meeting, and arranged a time.
I didn't have the tape, but I went along anyway, as Sue and I used to eat cheaply there once or twice a week, straight after work. Andi nipped quickly in to pass on the tape to me, but couldn't stay, as he'd parked on double yellow lines outside the pub (this was before the days of metered parking on Wollaton Street!) By the time Andrew turned up, another group of people had appeared on the table next to us. Unbeknownst to us, this was another band that he'd arranged to meet. They all moved off together with Andrew after I'd passed him the tape. We did hear back from Andrew, though, as the other guys didn't want him to be in two bands, and we didn't mind, so he stuck with us. Which was handy.
Andrew's first sessions with us were a little strange. It's important to remember that we didn't have anything concrete - just a couple of chord progressions here, a spooky intro there, and one or two structures that were more or less songs, sans lyrics. We'd also got into the habit of playing the Sensational Alex Harvey Band standard "Faith Healer", inspired by Fish's cover of it. We played all of this to Andrew, and he seemed fairly receptive, but shied away from any positive comment. He tried to play along with things, and we gave him a CD which had digital versions of all our tapes on it. We hoped he'd come back!
He did come back, and we slowly started to write lyrics and complete arrangements.
TO BE CONTINUED
A list of pieces written (and surviving) at each stage follows.
Some songs may appear more than once on the list, if a significant
change was made during that period.
Terror from the Crate
After the Fall
Apathy
Area 51
The Assassin
Beat the Fucker with a Breaker Bar
Blues in a Cave
Calm Before the Storm
Dance of the Fireflies (aka Jangly One)
Deutschporn
Elegy
Enter the Deep
Fate of the Brethren (midi)
Fleeing from the Memory
Forgiveness
Happy Now in Funtown
Intense Pain, Intense Pain
Into War
Legions of the North
Life Goes On
Mandora
Meltdown
Mr Stiffy (Rodger's My Lodger)
Niniel
No
Peel Away the Light
Reap the Whirlwind
Reflections (aka C/G one)
Ride the Sky
Speed Thrill
Spooky Rhythmic Space Rocker
Stop Me and Buy One
Summer
Talking with the Statues
Temptation
The All-Seeing I
The Cheese Song
The Diet Song
The Last Breath
The Plains
The Stranger
The Reaper of Souls
Toils of the Necromancer
Tomorrow (later recorded by me on Everdark's third album, "Signs and Omens")
Trapped in a Bottle
Zeebrugge
The Altar
Andi's Guitar Solo
Diablo
Fade Away
The Grip of Fear
The Horn of Leviathan
Suffer the Children
Swansong
Tears in the Rain
Black Angel
Forgiveness
The Last Breath
Fade Away
Faith Healer (cover)
Cell 13
Arachnid Eyes (first as Skinsuit Issue)
Terror from the Crate
Nyctophonia
Paedo Dave
The Stag
Faith Healer (cover)
The Spaces Inbetween
Coming Round
Fleeing from the Memory
Sister Cystitis
Paranoid (cover)
Knockin' on Heaven's Door (cover)
Lithium (cover)
Missed Her Misery
Follow
Waste of Time (previously Cell 13)
Devil Within
Brand New Sin
Reasons
House of the Rising Sun (cover)
Close Your Eyes
Within the Lie
Into Your Arms
Neurosis
Surrounded
Older
Two Songs
Brotherhood
Note that the listed line-up doesn't necessarily denote writing credits for listed tracks.
See also:
Manichae's website
Manichae's MySpace profile