Steve Chowne

Vocals and Instruments

Jenny Maddox

Guest Vocals

Chris Green

Sound Engineering

Family comes first and when they are relatively little, actual free time is in remarkably short supply. Looking back, I’m amazed that we managed to produce Accident & Emergency at all. We all had day jobs, and between Chris, Tush and myself, enough children to start a kindergarten. It was no surprise then that there was another long gap before the next album of material materialised. Ironically, this one took the longest, and had the longest track list, which is at least poetically sympathetic. We had no timeline or vision beyond recognising the value in continuing to do something for ourselves. Essentially it was an excuse for Chris and me to keep meeting up and talking nonsense for a few hours, and then sort of knuckling down and doing some music when one of us looked at the clock and said the magic words:

“I supposed we ought to get started.”

Commuting for work wasn’t so much of a thing, but being away from home was. For much of the period that 33 and a Third was being put together, I was stuck in Germany for work. It went on for months at a time, and became unreasonable. There were impacts on me, on my family life, and on my access to music to let it out. You can hear this in some of the writing.

One of the escapes I found in Germany was a room in the client’s labyrinthine estate containing a piano. For some reason my security pass granted me access but kept most others out. I exploited this anomaly in the small hours when the place was quiet, and I was waiting for a test run to finish; it kept me relatively sane. I had no [sheet] music to play from, just what was in my head. Snippets of Debussy, snippets of Beethoven, and snippets of mine were thrashed and abused, and seeded never to be repeated innovations that would last an hour at a time. I ignored the occasional audience that I was aware would sometimes gather outside the door obscured by the blinds. This was my time.

Back at home, I added a new instrument to the pile… a proper digital piano. Hefty but portable, proper black, proper weighted keys, with both analogue and digital interfaces straight into the computer so all those bum notes could be made to magically disappear as if they had never happened.

There are some good bits on this record, and there are some bits that should be on the cutting room floor. This is the first album where I had my hands on software allowing me to write with a mouse rather than listening to my fingers working the piano. This both opened doors in my ability to literally visualise my ideas, but also left me a bit ungoverned. In places you can hear the experimentation, testing the art of the possible with this new tech. In other places, you can hear a jumbled mess where an idea either lacked clarity, or there was insufficient skill to pull it off. Throughout, you can hear the gap left by Tush being on the other edge of the continent.

By time I was writing the material for 33 and a Third, the little sproglets were growing. This of course meant all the usual things associated with kids and growing up. Father Christmas, (debunked by our very smart four year for being illogical and inconsistent with shoe box appeals), school and family day trips. Since we were the perfect family, our day trips were a model for all others to emulate. Our children were never hungry, never fell in anything, never misbehaved, and were admired by all other families across the land as role models. Or perhaps we were normal.

Some years before when I was a wee nipper, I went to school. There was just the one teacher I had for the full five years of secondary school. She was an evil cow. I had her for English. (My interpretation of events is that …) as a consequence of daring to attend a violin lesson during the first term of my first year, and therefore miss half an hour of English, she then belittled and bullied me for the next five years. She took every opportunity to instil in myself a belief that I was useless at her subject. Precious is not dedicated to her. None of my songs are dedicated to her. My English is fine.

It took a while to work this one out. When the headteacher of a local school at which I was the deputy chair of governors was regularly asking me to proofread her letters, I think that was probably the convincing evidence to myself that my English O level was justified.

Back to the album timeline and I was by this point getting on a bit: 33, and so were all the boys and girls that I had grown up with. Should we be grown up by this point, settled down and happy? Some of us were, and some of us weren’t. This is one of us that clearly wasn’t and was pursuing an extended existential crisis.

With all the travel to and from Germany for work, I spent way too much time hanging around in, and resenting hanging around in airports. For someone who has a bit of a problem doing nothing, this enforced loitering was a bit of an issue.

I have learnt the hard way that past performance of an author is not a reliable indicator to choose what’s next. I loved The Count of Monte Christo, and so settled down to read The Three Musketeers.  However, by chapter whatever, I was urging them to skewer each other as quickly as possible, in the vain hope that the last two thirds of the book were just pictures of meerkats doing amusing things in eighteenth century French hats. (Apparently this is a form of perfectionism, sorry kids…).

I realise I do the same with films and TV series. (This too, kids… sorry again.)

When out in Germany, I was being sold out to work at EUMETSAT – the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellite Data. They do love an acronym. And funky clouds.

We were doing clever stuff with satellite imagery there, and you will have seen it on the TV when contemplating whether to take a brolly out for the day.  But the work was taking an age for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was [let’s call him] Geoff. Geoff was on their side, and he was the text-book blocker to finishing anything. He blocked everything because, technically, he could. Whilst we could move towards a perfectly acceptable compromise, he always chose not to. Geoff had his reasons, and from where I sat, they were unprofessional.

This album really is too long. Back in the old days, the audience was kept awake by having to get up and turn the record over occasionally, and then for something this length, the listener actually had to put some real effort into changing to a second disc. The act of having to supply a second bit of vinyl (and thus a gatefold sleeve) was presumably enough of a shock to wake up the producers into paying sufficient attention to how much this was all costing, and the likely backlash if in fact the product was bloated with a load of experimental nonsense that didn’t really warrant pressing.

Whilst we’re on the subject of being a teenager, I can’t quite believe it took me until I was in my thirties for this next rant to escape as the primal scream that it is. My parents sent me to Church. They didn’t take me, I was sent every Sunday, presumably so that they could pursue parenty-things in the child-free house that resulted in a couple of hours each week.

The head honcho of this particular church, selected by my parents on the basis of it being the one around the corner, was a vain man. He was an arrogant and opinionated man. The sort of man who might appear in an BBC Agatha Christie special on Christmas Eve who you immediately suspect as being guilty, or failing that, hopefully next to be knocked off.  I would like to thank him here.

I’d like to thank him for being so egotistical as to think it was OK to guilt-shame his congregation into dipping into their pockets for months, to fund his holier-than-thou pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He was obviously good at collecting for this particular charity – he raised enough for his pilgrimage to be upgraded to a Red Sea beach holiday for him and his extended family.

Everyone has doubts, but as a teenager, this helped me understand the true nature of the organisation I was being encouraged to believe in. Jesus, was I cross.

The dark was lifted from my eyes. I was born again, and I never looked back. I went out into the world, an evangelistic atheist.

Having addressed the spiritual demons of the past, I return to matters of the moment. Something more pressing. This probably doesn’t deserve too much detail, other than to recognise that it is a physiological issue shared with a huge proportion of the western world. Since writing this jolly little number about how funny it all is, I have discovered that addressing a gluten intolerance works wonders.

The penultimate number on 33 and a Third is another morality tale. I changed the name when writing the song because it’s real. Sure, there’s artistic license in forming the meter and rhyme, but Sheldon did meet his premature death by such misadventure. I didn’t know him personally, but I had been friends with a couple of his family for many years.

33 and a Third closes (finally) with the reprise of Sleepy. This has been a very long album, made longer by the drawn-out way in which we pulled it together. With just Chris and I pulling the strings now, the imperative to finish at some point, gave the project free reign to drift more or less endlessly to the right. Of course, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids keep taking precedence, maybe it would have been a smidge tighter, but then there would have been a little less of that amusing experimentation. It is what it is.