Video footage by Tony Moon Sound recordings, bass and guitar by RH Recitation and piano by James Fletcher. Edited and mixed (and minimal organ drone) by Charlie Frances at Stwdio Penty.
From Robyn on Patreon in 2023 1984 in Southern England looks now almost as grey and decrepit as it does in Orwell’s novel. I must have actually been there at the time because in this film you can see a younger version of me capering around in a series of railway carriages.
This is the footage that Tony Moon shot for the video we made for the song “I Often Dream of Trains” which was recorded that year. Tony and had I bonded on a tour of Norway in autumn of 1982, when he was the front man and vocalist of Motor Boys Motor. An unholy amalgam of Captain Beefheart, Doctor Feelgood and The Stranglers they rocked the fjords and fall-out shelters, along with my own power trio. We all bundled in a yellow splitter van that lurched around 1000-metre drops and through ominous tunnels, all to play to sozzled Norwegian teenagers who had never heard of us.
This was such an intense experience that Tony and I both decided to quit performing live. So making videos - inexpensive silent ones on Super-8 film - was a fun avenue to explore. For the “Trains” project we set off from Waterloo Station in London, alighted for a while at Basingstoke, and then took a bus from Winchester to a railway siding that was full of abandoned rolling stock. I’m afraid I can’t remember exactly where this train graveyard was (Alresford possibly) nor can I find any trace of it now. It was February, and a harsh, feeble sunlight leered at us in the dead Hampshire vegetation. Wandering up and down disused railway corridors seemed to sum up my life back then: I was yet to discover America.
Looking at the footage from 40 years on it reveals a quaint almost deserted world. The empty buffet car with state-of-the-catering Maxpax plastic coffee cups and Luncheon Voucher stickers, the giant broadsheet Guardian newspaper I’m reading in the compartment I have all to myself, the flickering destination board at Waterloo; all vanished now. I’d thought was a surrealist touch, talking into a telephone receiver: after all, who would ever imagine making a phone call on a train?
Many years later I took the footage, transferred from Super-8 to Video to DVD, up to Charlie’s studio in Cardiff. I also brought along my old Fostex 4-track cassette machine on which had I recorded the demos for “I Often Dream of Trains”. We found various instrumentals from that era, and some recitations by my old friend James Fletcher who briefly played sax with the early Egyptians. Charlie and I edited excerpts from these cassette tapes into a sound collage to accompany these grainy flashbacks and then somehow forgot all about it…until now.
Ironically while I was on the train from London up to Cardiff I pulled out the old Fostex machine to check what was on the tapes. One of them had 5 songs that I’d written for the “Trains” LP. When I arrived at Charlie’s I discovered I’d left it on the train - and I never saw it again…