The Carbon Casino Gamble

It’s been a few days now since the last blurred Jack Daniel’s insulated sounds of Carbon Casino 7 have faded back into the quiet of life here in Somerset and at last I can reflect with some kind of clarity my experiences of these last seven weeks. Its been quite a time.

I felt like I was involved in something special every week which grew and took on a shape of its own. When we’d first talked about doing these small shows eating fish and chips with our Publicist Tony Linkin and record man John Pearson I had no idea of what would become way of life which would rise to engulf us all.

Mick had come up with the venue the Inn on the Green – it was perfect. The most fitting of venues – a kind of bar come youth club built into the concrete piles of the Westway, the raised A40 motorway into London. Snaking its way above Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road, past the tower blocks of flats where I had first met Mick at his grans home on the 18th floor. We would stare out through the fog of London in 1975, mesmerised by its yellow sodium lights and continual traffic passing below us… in our first meetings we spent many evenings driving up and down that strip of road together especially as we’d both just read Crash, the book by J G Ballard that romanticised that piece of motorway in the climax of the book. That raised motorway which was to become such a potent image in the mythology of the Clash as London burned with boredom back in 1975. That same strip of motorway that I would drive nearly every day between my flat in Marylebone and our studio in Acton from early 2002 right up until now while we wrote our songs together… reunited again for our new band Carbon/Silicon. We’d both come a long way to return full circle to the part of London we both loved……

And here we were in this tiny room, with a stage no higher than 6 inches and a room that was not meant to hold more than 200 people with that same traffic roaring unknowingly just inches above our heads. This room was to become our home and focus for the next 7 weeks and what adventures we would have……

Also, just before Christmas my wife Penelope had put the DVD of Casino, the brilliant film by Scorsece on to watch, with me complaining like I always do that I’d already seen it and why watch it again ….and then seconds later being drawn in and engrossed and inspired. The Carbon Casino.. it came to me –  it sounded romantic, fitting, inspirational ….and I loved DeNiro’s suits in the movie and so I could start to imagine how the evenings might be and about how we could make it different from just another gig… It was the perfect name to tie the shows together.

So here was our rough plan… there wouldn’t be a set list, we’d just make it up on the night with no pressure, have a chance to try out songs we rarely played rather on big shows where you felt you must play the professional set… then we’d have support groups getting to play a couple of numbers and then maybe in the encore we’d have a friend or two to play with us (we had no idea who at that point, though we were thinking we would keep it to people we’d grown up with rather than try to drag in superstars…), maybe even play a cover or track that would be new to us.. help to keep it fresh each week.  Actually I just looked back at our initial press release and at the Casino logo I’d quickly run up in photoshop that same night we’d watched the DVD it was to be….. spontaneous. Well it turned out more than that as the club very quickly developed a life of its own.

I have this vision in my head now of Mick coming into our Thursday  rehearsal with one of his tiny pieces of paper with possible lists of support acts… the Dirty Curtains, British Voodoo, Usual Suspects, Hello Kitty, Tauras Tracker, Rotten Hill Gang and many more… people who were about in West London, friends of friends…. it seems like the list grew each week… grew completely out of control as we got to the final 2 shows where the weekly gig had turned into a weekly pop festival with 10 bands playing.. it was unstoppable.  I remember in the first couple of weeks our manager Clive Banks telling us we must play at 10.00 p.m latest or people wouldn’t get home, that agents wouldn’t see us if we were on too late… but it became impossible to keep to any schedule as more bands wanted on… Mick met a busker on Portobello Road the afternoon of the first show and invited him to play.. he looked like a young Ray Davis –  it was uncanny – and John Byrne became a regular feature  and then by CC7 he was covering Waterloo Sunset.. it was as if the perfect players for the Kinks BioPic were growing before our eyes.

By the time CC7 came around we were playing at 12 midnight… but what could we do?   We just went with it. Sorry to people who missed their train home or the night bus. I think it was worth it if you stayed anyway, and sorry to the promoters who flew over from Germany especially to see us and didn’t get in because it was too full – you were on the guest list but they threw away the guest list at 8 p.m because no one else would fit.

…and We just went with it…..

I felt a real sense of excitement that first week arriving at 6.30 for the first sound check seeing so many people gathered already waiting….We started out week one quite together actually, played a set of 10 songs, put in some songs we’d not played in a while ….and then the first guest came on.

When Mick and I started out playing with Carbon/Silicon we had this thing that we would never play the old songs from our previous bands… we believed it was important to establish the new material we’d written together, material which we’d written as grown ups, about our lives now.  It would have been too easy to sprinkle Clash or Generation X tracks through the set, easy, but a road that so many reforming bands or bands of our age find that leads to disaster – because your new material never gets room to breathe and establish itself.   But just recently, after recording nearly 4 albums, having played over 50 shows, in interviews we had started to say we ‘might one day’ play some of the back catalogue …………..one day…..

Topper Headon was fragile, fragile after those early years of drug problems and now rehab climbs and Gods punishment of youths excess. We were both so pleased to see him when he had walked in that night looking fresh and alert, professor-like almost. Mick had not been on stage with him for 25 years.

He walked on for the encore, only visible to the front row but familiar to everyone as he played the unmistakable opening drum beat to Train in Vain and all emotional hell broke loose. I could feel it too. Topper, the original Clash powerhouse drummer smiling and hugging me.

Over the next few weeks the ‘guests’ heard about it just in time and called up. Glen Matlock the Pistols original bass player even turned up to rehearse on the second Thursday session, with the lyrics to Twist and Shout typed out neatly and sang loud and confidently. We’d known Glen since those early 1975 London SS days in our tiny rehearsal studio in Praed Street by Paddington Station… I can still remember him walking in with Paul Cook and playing The Who’s Substitute brilliantly with us even then ….did I say it seemed like (cliche) yesterday – but it did.. Paul even got up for the final rendition of Stepping Stone... Richard Archer from Hard Fi, all twinkly smile and ever higher quiffing hair played E=Mc2 with us with Ross his guitarist.  I really liked them both.

Actually it did start to feel like a pressure sometimes on a Monday when we had no one lined up, that people might be disappointed if no one came on with us, but one week we deliberately had no one, choosing to play all of our first CD The Last Post in order of the record in its entirety. We wanted to keep the weekly show unpredictable… well, we tried to.

We had a Liverpool week where our old friend Pete Wylie, more Jimmy Tarbuck now than ever and funny as hell sang Come Back the Wah hit. As I sat at home learning the song that morning I marvelled at how clever and brilliant the chords and tune were. In fact it was a great experience each week just learning these songs, reading the lyrics and remembering the past times that produced them….what we’d all been through together living those tunes and still writing songs today, living new words and experiences….

It felt like the whole club was one big back stage area and we hung out in the bar before our set, watched the support acts and listened to Gary Crowley the Dj dropping new and old tunes. People came up, chatted and told us their memories of past days and new. It was like being at your own party… well if you were there then you know.

Hmmm, this blogs getting really long, but there are so many memories that I’m just going to list them here….

Seeing a huge queue outside in the cold and seeing someone wearing a McNulty t-shirt after I’d been raving about the TV show The Wire…

Chatting to James Dean Bradfield from the Manics (who was so nice, arriving that night completely unassuming, carrying his guitar …and watching him tuning it himself, completely un-rockstar like for someone just awarded the NME Godlike Genius Award…) and him telling me how they’d all come to see Sputnik playing in Newport in Wales in 86 and being blown away by it….He also told me he remembered me being in the audience at an early Manics show at Fulham Broadway and me standing there with a young relatively unknown actress called….Elizabeth Hurley.

Eating a hamburger at the venue outside and feeling like I was back at the Roundhouse in 74 to see The Pink Fairies…. there was an almost dare I say Counter Culture deja vu moment engulfing me….

Wondering what celebrity crimper Nicky Clarke was doing with Kelly Hoppen in the tiny curtained section at the side of the stage where a hundred support acts were changing… could a design makeover be possible here?…

At CS 6 there being so many people crammed in the room that the condensation was dripping so much off the ceiling that it felt like it was raining on stage and it was hard to finger the notes because the fretboard was so slippery.

Seeing so many old faces hanging out or was it hanging on?  Some of them I was glad to see – others not so much……

Standing in the audience as reggae (from the Stars dub album) thumped the room and I was taken back to all those magical early Roxy Club shows where Don Letts always played Dub before the gig – it was symbolic of the amazing feeling we had then of the two cultures coming together.. funny to think there was even a question of separation now in todays world…

The fantastic vibe every week –  there’s such a feeling of positivity in the air, I loved it when the whole audience sang the refrain of the News “and the weather’s good!!” .. so many new people in the audience mouthing every word to every song.  I have to say that that’s still such a amazing thing – it still touches you and we’ve both played a lot of shows in our time, but this time these words somehow mean something far more  personal.

Is this what makes it all work- we can play a gig and hang out at our own party too and its not about the money its about the, dare I say it, art and ideas… if only they had some more toilets…

Talking of which, one night I pulled rank in the buildings only toilet to get to the front of the queue just before we were meant to go on (we did not have time to queue up it was ..urgent!) – I found myself in the second of the only two stalls  trying to pee next to Paul Cook the Drummer of the Sex Pistols... while  all around us the queue regaled us with “I saw you in 1977 stories….” all really affectionate.. but guys, this is a private thing we’re doing here, well at best an anonymous kinda thing… Paul whispered to me desperately “I can’t go with people watching” and nor could I!  We both stood there waiting for business to begin and the longer nothing happened the more self concious we became…. we both were aware of the magnified time we stood there, the queue patiently waiting… and er, watching ….“look who’s having a piss everyone”…. “what time are you on?”… hmm, well actually never if we don’t get going here…..

Ilyana the artist painting amazing pictures at the side of the room while everyone played…

Mick’s daughter Lauren, who I have known since she was born, up on stage singing with her band and Mick reading his “poetry section”  while I jammed a version of the Generation X song “Kiss me Deadly” underneath ..and I saw people mouthing those words too.. and more

Another show… And a thousand other memories…

OK and then on to the final night of madness and by then everyone is  completely carried away so hey lets have a Sopranos themed evening!  Why would you not……

Everyone who buys a ticket on the final night gets a free raffle ticket!  We give away Champagne, a model Aston Martin as used in Casino Royale and a box set of the Sopranos DVD’s – all  6 series…

And on that final night CC7 for the main set we had the Wheel of Fortune. 20 songs painted onto a huge multicoloured wheel.  We got people up to spin the wheel and will play whatever fate chooses.  Sienna Miller spins…so too does Rhys Ifans and for him fate chooses Should I Stay or Should I Go as the last song before……

Our final guests get up for the encore – The Alabama 3 who actually sing the Sopranos theme tune from the TV series.  We love this song and it seems everyone else does too as it gets a rousing rendition…. woke up this morning.. and we certainly did…they were incredible.

We did come back on for a final version of “Why do men Fight”……and it was over

Oh yes before I forget, we recorded the whole evening onto Pro Tools to mix for a possible live album release (sounds great btw – I just heard a mix)

So before I go to sleep I want to say thanks to all the harassed bouncers who did a great job in the face of all the pushing by people who thought they were more important than people who queued and paid to get in, because the pushing people were definitely NOT more important. Thanks to those who queued at 3.00 pm in the afternoon to make sure they were first to get tickets and to get their wristbands. Thanks to people who came hundreds of miles and didn’t get in but who came back the next week earlier and then did. Thanks to those who came from the USA, from Europe and from Newcastle, Dorset, Somerset and even just up the road. Thanks to those who came from Scotland and got thrown out one week for being too drunk and then came back the next week to actually see the show. Thanks to everyone who asked me “what time are you on?” and I said “fuck knows” cos fuck knows had a tiny list of 200 bands who were gonna play that night and they were all going on….. thanks to the people who run The Inn on the Green and thanks especially to Phil Beaumont our tour manager for managing to keep it all together – we could NOT have done this without him….

Finally thanks to everyone who came, who queued, bought me drinks, shared their experiences with me, said hello in the bar, had their photos taken with us, thanks to all the bands who played especially the ones aged 15 because you are the future, thanks to all the friends and guests who played with us and especially to Penelope who put up with me crashing home drunk every Friday at 3.00 am to tell her the stories….

I hope we’ll see you at the next London show, the Next Carbon Casino when we come back from the States