NEW NEWS

Guild Theatre, Menlo Park, 17th March and Little Saint, Healdsburg, 18th March.

Turns out that Menlo Park is the home of the Veterans’ Administration Hospital where the CIA operated the MK-ULTRA program by means of which hallucinogenic drugs were administered to subjects in the pursuit of ‘mind control’. Ken Kesey volunteered at the facility. He went on to write ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. Robert Hunter who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead was a subject too. Explains a thing or two.

Down the road is Menlo-Atherton High School, from which another member of Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, was expelled. Alumni of the high school also included Stevie Nicks and Linsday Buckingham. Weir would have been in the year above Nicks, and Nicks in the year above Buckingham. Jerry Garcia attended another neighbourhood school in Menlo Oaks.

None of them came to our show. We didn’t even put them on the list. Well, there’d be even less than little point in putting Hunter and Garcia on the list for obvious reasons.

Healdsburg is basically a den of vegans and oenologists. Raymond Burr who played Robert T Ironside and Perry Mason on television died at his ranch near the town after a number of “goodbye parties”, apparently.

Here’s the list of songs we did at both the Guild Theatre and at Little Saint:

Sun Arise

This song was pretty much the reason how James was the successful applicant for guitar-player with Shane MacGowan’s band The Nipple Erectors at his audition for the ‘name’ band (so it said on the advert in the Melody Maker) in 1980. James and Shane sort of just started playing it. Maybe they’d both heard the Alice Cooper version of the song. Weirdly, the song “Ignore the Machine” by Alien Sex Fiend starts with the opening lyrics of “Sun Arise” – weird, because James auditioned for Alien Sex Fiend too, around the same time. It wasn’t much of an audition: James showed up on his bicycle, without a guitar and Nik Wade offered him the guitar-playing spot with his band.

The song starts with Bryan Head, our drummer, hitting these together:

These are clapsticks from Australia.

Lord Randall’s Bastard Son

Seo Yun

The Story Has an End

Will You Go Lassie Go

The Old Tar Road to Sligo

The Blackbird Only Sings One Song

All these songs are one the Walker Roaders’ debut, self-titled LP.

Kind Stranger

This was a song James wrote with an idea for submitting it for consideration for the Pogues musical that never, but nearly, was. The chorus goes: “We never turned a stranger out unless he came from County Cork”. It refers to some kind of rivalry between the people who live in Tipperary and those who come from Cork and is set against the background of the American Civil War.

Streams of Whiskey

The Boys From County Hell

These two were from the Pogues’ debut record “Red Roses For Me”. James sang the first. Marc sang the second because James can never remember the words for it. And Marc’s a better singer.

Swagger

This one was an instrumental from Flogging Molly’s second studio LP “Drunken Lullabies”, which presumably got its title from the band’s first studio LP. Check it out on your preferred music platform and marvel at the rate at which Ted starts it off and how, when the rest of the band comes in, it kind of meets one of those ‘runaway truck ramps’.

The Rock On Which My Dreams May Perish

This one isn’t on any LP, but can be found in instrumental form in the audiobook of the memoir James wrote: “Here Comes Everybody“. Each verse in the song is full of Irish writers whose talent is, well, daunting. The chorus is adapted from something Terry Woods who played cittern in the Pogues would say whenever an inconvenience arose in his day/life.

Here Comes The Ice

This song was from the Walker Roaders’ debut LP.

Gangsters

The pointy and barbed end of this song has a place deep between the shoulder-blades of the Republicans’ nominee for President.

There Must Be Less To Life Than This

This song was released as a single last month. The title comes from Irvine Welsh’s novel “Trainspotting”. It’s about some Scottish guys James used to live with near Paddington, London.

The Captain Swings in the Trees

This song was one from the last days of the Low and Sweet Orchestra and the first days of Cranky George. It kind of takes inspiration from Jacques Brel’s “Amsterdam“, and the piss out of “Fabulous Places” from the 1967 version of Dr Dolittle (with Rex Harrison, Samantha Eggar and Anthony Newley singing).

The encores were Dirty Old Town and You Wear It Well

Dirty Old Town speaks for itself.

The Walker Roaders are big fans of The Faces and a lot of Rod Stewart’s stuff. We’ve been writing a song about Maggie May, called….”Maggie May”, which envisions the narrator going to meet Maggie May in Alexandra Park in Oldham, England, but she either has died or been shipped off to the colonies, or both.

We loved playing in both Menlo Park and Healdsburg. We hope they’ll have us back at some point.