Alan Clayson and The Argonauts

There isn’t sufficient space to relate more than the barest bones
of the saga. Nevertheless, its central figures will surface as regularly
as rocks in the stream in an eventual full-scale memoir of my peculiar
career – partly because there are still people around today who’ll tell
you that (Alan) Clayson and the Argonauts was the greatest group ever
formed. Indeed, under certain conditions, I think so myself, but then I
was its Marat, its Danton, its Robespierre, its Mirabeau and its
Bonaparte. Certainly, there’d never been a time or a situation – or a
musical entity – like it.

Clayson and belong to an era nearly as bygone as that bracketed by
Hitler’s downfall and “Rock Around The Clock”. We left the runway in
1976 after John Tobler wrote a glowing New Musical Express report on our
set when we semi – gatecrashed a bill of pre-punk fare at Guildford
Civic Hall. This was only a fortnight after we’d been hustled out of a
palais in Reading at gunpoint. The promoter found our show so “rubbish”
that he felt entitled not to pay us. On this threshold of eminence too,
one key member was gaoled for fifteen months, and two others quit, one
of them fated to co-produce Hilda Baker and Arthur Ballard’s
chartbusting duet of “You’re The One That I Want”.

Generally, however, the wheels of the universe were rolling in our
direction as the watershed year of 1977 loomed. Suddenly, there seemed
to be some kind of future with no more hint of tragedy or farce. A few
important media and music industry folk started flocking round like
friendly if over-attentive wolfhounds, most conspicuously, Ron Watts, a
godfather of punk, who had helped Malcolm McLaren launch The Sex
Pistols. Thanks to Ron, we made a London debut at the 100 Club (with The
Jam, both of us warming up for something called Stripjack) on 9 January
1977. Next up was a full-page Melody Maker Spread, courtesy of its
enthralled future editor, Allan Jones. Crucially, I was being spoken of
and written about in the same sentences as Wreckless Eric, John Otway,
Tom Robinson and Elvis Costello.

So began three years of expecting to be on Top Of The Pops next week.
An almost overwhelming sweep of events embraced more dates than could
possibly be kept; a BBC Radio One In Concert (which turned up on a 2001
Clayson bootleg, Ghostly Talking Heads), and headlining at venues such
as the Marquee, back at the 100 Club, Amsterdam’s Melkweg and any number
of university hops, among them Queen’s College Belfast at the height of
the Troubles, where an ecstatic audience was still demanding more after
no less

than six encores. In parenthesis, what became The Eurythmics supported us at some college function in the Midlands.

Delivering “more than a performance, an experience” (Sounds), Clayson
and the Argonauts were, therefore, a very “happening” group, judging
too by the clusters chattering excitedly as they spilled out onto the
pavements after a sweatbath with us inside, say, Hugh Wycombe’s Nag’s
Head, Eric’s in Liverpool, West London’s Nashville Rooms, the Penthouse
in Scarborough or the Exit in

Rotterdam, always one week after Wreckless Eric and one week before The
Adverts. En route, we were catalysts of the wreckage of a Luton
auditorium; a near-lynching at Barbarella’s in Birmingham; fisticuffs
and a consequent car chase following a midnight matinee in Canning Town;
a season in a red-light district sur le continent (our “Hamburg”
period); a woman clambering on stage to tear off all her clothes at
Islington’s celebrated Hope-and-Anchor, and a bloke doing the same
during almost-but-not-quite a riot at the Granary in Bristol.

Soon, we were past resistance to the circumstances that had made it
impossible to go back then to anyone’s old routine of get up-get to
work-get home-get to bed groundhog days that once passed for a life. If
the van had drawn up outside a ballroom on Pluto, it mightn’t have
seemed all that odd.

Yet fast must come the hour when fades the fairest flower.
Furthermore, the underside of our marvellous achievements was that,
though I was “in a premier position on rock’s lunatic fringe” (Melody
Maker again), I was running a provincial outfit most of the time from a
telephone kiosk down the road. All I could promise an Argonauts, fished
principally from the same pool of local musicians, was an even more
glorious tomorrow.

When it didn’t dawn, our van mutated into a travelling asylum as ears
strained to catch murmured conspiracy. A stoic cynicism would sour to
cliff-hanging silences, sullen exchanges and the drip-drip of those
antagonisms, discords and intrigues that make pop groups what they are.
As we lurched from gig to gig, a rueful but light-hearted mood might
persist for several miles before a tacit implication in an apparently
innocuous remark could spark off a slanging match that would continue on
arrival in another strange city, another distant soundcheck, another
affirmation of a ramshackle grandeur. Back home, loved ones would wonder
in that ancient night until headlamps signalled one more deliverance
from the treadmill of the road. Yet there were still moments when…

That there was something not so much rotten but smelling funny in the
state of Clayson and the Argonauts became evident firstly when “The
Taster”, a godawful one-shot single, was issued on Virgin Records
against my better judgement, and damaging to both my confidence and
credibility as a composer. Coupled with “Landwaster”, an excerpt from a
then-unreleased in-concert LP,

it was a “turntable hit” (e.g. Number Three in Time Out, the London
events guide’s chart). Moreover, so I understood later, “Landwaster”
entered Belgium’s Top Twenty fleetingly after a pirate radio presenter
began spinning it by mistake instead of the A-side.

This 45 was also a prelude to a voyage to a lower circle of hell for
me and an Argonauts in gradually more constant flux. Nevertheless, there
was always sufficient to feed hope, and I’d been famous enough to want
to battle hard against being consigned back to the oblivion from whence
I’d come.

In our decline, an Exeter-based independent label put out a rather
eschatologically-titled EP, Last Respects, and an album, What A
Difference A Decade Made, was a critical cause célebre, earning rave
reviews in both Folk Roots (!) and The Observer.

However, to quote from Tony Hancock’s suicide note, “things seemed to
go wrong too many times”. The morning after we played to a crowd of
twelve back at the Nag’s Head, I received an agitated call from our road
manager to say that, while he was loading up, £500-worth of borrowed
microphones had been stolen.

After just over a decade as a working band, Clayson and the
Argonauts, our very name now a millstone round our necks, made a final
public appearance on 20th January 1986. By then, we were like a soldier
that had been fatally wounded, but kept fighting, not knowing how severe
the injury was. To all intents and purposes, we’d been over for ages, a
faded memory, a tattered

newspaper cutting. Thus we scattered like vermin disturbed in a granary.
All that was left – until now – was the sound of our aural
junk-sculptures as a spooky drift from the shadows in some lonely
back-of-beyond dance hall, maybe one refurbishment away from demolition…

Alan Clayson