The All Night Decorators
The Story So Far.............
Part Three: The Little Green Folder
The Decorators carried on rehearsing in the sub-zero setting of Stonehaven Pavilion. Often reduced to cramming themselves into the smallest room in the building, and site of the only heater, to allow their frozen fingers to thaw long enough to play their ever expanding song list.
Songs in the set at the time included originals like Window On The World, Leaving Letter, Yesterday's Hero, May Your Grief Be Private, The Town Where Time Stood Still, Tunes Of Glory and many more which survive only in memory, and on the vast collection of tapes which Stephen and Boardman have stashed away as an ill-advised retirement fund. Cover versions like Los Lobos' Will The Wolf Survive and Springsteen's Rendezvous slotted, seamlessly, into what they referred to as their "act" A notable favourite at the time was Stephen's tribute to Buddy Holly, Mason City which luckily has only been heard by a few, all of whom required strong drink/counselling/sick-bags.
The size of the rehearsal space and its remoteness from complaining neighbours allowed the boys, and Stephen, in particular, to give it "some welly" in the volume department. They were helped in their pursuit of deafness by a pair of visiting drummers who justified the lads mistrust of members of the tub-thumping fraternity by being unimpressed by their entire repertoire, only showing signs of enthusiasm, and life, when an unrehearsed version of Deep Purple's Black Night was attempted. The Black Night Effect on drummers will later reappear in the band's saga.
Friends of the band, keen to see just why these grown men always "had something else to do" on a Tuesday night, eventually came knocking on the door. Finlay Crossan (see part one) was an early visitor, and one of the few who came more than once! On one of his visits Crossan brought with him a character who would feature prominently in the next stage of the Decorators' development. This was the oil-executivular, Arbroathian, bootleg-collector and, suddenly, budding impressario, Jim Cargill, often referred to by the boys as Leggy Mountbatten, fabled manager of Rutles fame.While Crossan gave up his visits, Cargill persevered, never believing that what he heard as "off-nights" were as good as the band ever got.
Boardman had by this time found his security blanket. Looking from the outside like a cheap green ring binder containing meaningless scribbled chord sequences this was, in effect, Boardman's version of "solid ground", without it he was lost in the void, weightlessly floating in a world where time signatures and chord progressions had no meaning. So, no change there then.
Throughout the long dark and cold winter nights, and then short dark and cold summer nights the boys strummed away on the Stonehaven seafront. No sign of improvement but somehow that never seemed to matter. Sadly all good things come to an end. Whether it was that the pavilion was due to receive a long overdue refurbishment, or that the massed protests of the Stonie jellyfish and seagull collective had finally been listened to is unclear. The outcome was that the boys no longer had a rehearsal space.
The story could quite simply have ended there had it not been for the intervention of Jim Cargill, remember him, who offered the band the use of an entire industrial estate full of empty warehouses., courtesy of his employers at the time.While Stephen was keen to have one of the massive, echo-chamboreal, noise-enhancing hangars all to himself he finally concede that it would benefit the groups challenging concept of playing in time if they kept it to one.
In keeping with the strange synchroncity which guided the band's career the change of venue was accompanied by another historic milestone. Boardman was by this time shackled to the employment chains of Aberdeen Journals. Also seeing out a sentence in the Devil's Island of the job market was one Alistair Blair. What attracted the Decorators to this man was not his good humour, his height advantage, his recent vasectomy and certainly not his devotion to St Johnstone FC, no, Blair had one attribute which outshone all others. He owned a set of drums and was daft enough to come along to a draughty, filthy warehouse once a week to rehearse.
Now the boys had power under their musical bonnet and proceeded to torment the factory rats of Altens with ever mounting decibels. So the rehearsals continued....