From Medway to Abbey Road
Plus 139 homes proposed for former school site, a review of Koreatown, our weekly events guide, and more
Allan Crockford is a prolific figure within the Medway music scene. As such, it only seemed right that our music columnist Stephen Morris looked at the no fewer than three albums he’s releasing this year. Further down, we have news on 139 new homes being planned for a former school site in Chatham, Steven (the Keevil-shaped one) reviews Koreatown, a new dark kitchen outlet. Beyond that, we’ve got our weekly events guide and the latest news in brief. Not bad for a bank holiday weekend.
Editor’s note: Our Sunday interviews have become a popular feature, shining a light on figures both well-known or under the radar in Medway. Local media isn’t known for its in-depth sit-downs, so I’m very proud of them and of Steven for the hard work he puts into them. Since we started them, there have always been a few ‘big names’ we’ve wanted to speak to, and I’m thrilled to say that this Sunday, we’ll be publishing the first half of a two-part interview with the local legend Billy Childish. It’s a hell of a read, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. There’s an excerpt of the interview further down this edition, but if you want to receive the full thing on Sunday, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber. Hit the big orange button below to join hundreds of people supporting original local journalism for Medway.
From Medway to Abbey Road
by Stephen Morris
Allan Crockford is a busy man.
2024 is seeing him involved in the release of not one, not two, but three separate albums. “It’s not exactly Billy Childish”, he tells me, with a familiar glass of red half-empty deadpan in The Coopers Arms, Rochester. “But…”
At some undefined point later in this year there will be a release from The Penrose Web, comprising Allan Crockford and Ian Button from Death in Vegas and the gloriously named Papernut Cambridge. “We were kind vaguely friends on Facebook”, says Crockford, “because he was in Thrashing Doves who were on the same bill as The Prisoners (with whom Crockford played bass) and The Ramones at the Hammersmith Palais in ’86. We must have said hello that night.”
But a closer connection was made more recently at one of Kevin Younger’s theme nights at the Rochester Social Club. “We were having a bit of a chat back in the summer and just said, ‘Let’s do some stuff.’ Just a two-man songwriting project. We’ve got an album’s worth of stuff now, which has been really good.”
“I’ve not done anything like that before – collaborating as a songwriter with someone else because the writing for Galileo 7 is just me. So that’s been really good.”
Before the Penrose Web release, though, will come what will inevitably be seen by many as the highlight of the Medway music calendar: the release on 10 May of Morning Star, the first Prisoners album in – count them – 38 years. This will be followed on 24 May by a gig at Camden’s Roundhouse.
During the interview, I refer to the album and concert as a ‘reunion’, to which Crockford winces – ever so slightly. The term seems a little too strong for him, as if to imply the band has reformed for good.
Much as many might wish that to be the case, the reality of the situation - with other long-term musical projects, such as The Galileo 7, Graham Day and the Gaolers and the James Taylor Quartet still very much going concerns – makes a permanent reformation rather less practical than might be desired.
Whatever we’re calling this re-gathering of bandmates, its roots can be found back on 22 October 2021 when the four ex-Prisoners found themselves in the same room together. Allan Crockford and James Taylor were playing as part of a one-time revival of another blast from the past, Auntie Vegetable (“Medway's premier cod Acid-Garage Rock act”) at The Billabong Club in Rochester.
In an interview for the November 2023 edition of Mojo magazine, Graham Day, lead singer and guitarist with The Prisoners, recalled how ‘I didn’t have a clue Johnny and Jamie were going to be there too. I’d had a lot to drink and I thought, ‘Oh bollocks, I’ve got to get up. So I did, and we played four songs. It was brilliant.’
Crockford explains that much of the impetus behind both the recording of the new Prisoners album and the Roundhouse gig came from Johnny Symons, who was keen to get back behind the drumkit once more.
Where Prisoners albums from the 80s had been recorded at the likes of Herne Bay’s Oakwood Studios or Sheerness’s Woolly Studios, the recording of Morning Star – or at least part of it – was done at Abbey Road.
In honour of their rough and ready DIY work ethic, though, the parts not recorded in the studios that witnessed the creation of Revolver, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and The Bends were recorded at various homes, with files exchanged between band members.
There will, undoubtedly, be more to say on these pages about Morning Star in May. I, for one, am particularly excited about the prospect of a new Prisoners album.
In the meantime, though, the focus for Allan Crockford is on the latest release from his band, The Galileo 7. You, Me and Reality was released on 1 March and a finer specimen of swirly, psychedelic garage pop-rock it would be difficult to find.
“It’s been three and a half years in the making,” says the frontman. “We did a covers album (Decayed from 2020) as a sort of tenth anniversary thing, which was something that we were going to sell at gigs, but then lockdown happened.”
Despite the interruption of a worldwide pandemic – or possibly even because of it – Crockford’s creative output continued. Unable to meet up with the full band to rehearse and perform, Allan Crockford and his wife Viv Bonsels, the organist/keyboard player with The Galileo 7, whiled away their lockdown recording a selection of covers with accompanying videos to entertain friends and other musicians as part of a lockdown project created by The High Span’s Kevin Younger.
The result was a couple of albums released under the moniker of Sounds Incarcerated (Unswitchable Hits Vol 1 - A Year of Long Shadows and Short Memories (2021) and Unswitchable Hits Vol 2 - Another Year of Long Shadows and Short Memories (2022), together with an original Christmas single, ‘Space Christmas’).
Featuring covers of the likes of ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Porpoise Song’, Sounds Incarcerated’s brace of albums and accompanying imaginative videos proved to be a very helpful distraction for this half of The Galileo 7 from the realities of covid-19 and all the anxieties and risks associated with it.
Now, in 2024, album number six, seven or eight, depending on your point of view, marks a formal return to business as usual for The Galileo 7, with Mole Lambert back on drums and Paul Moss on bass. And it really has been worth the wait.
Don’t let the swirling, whirling psychedelic sounds deceive you; You, Me and Reality is as much a demonstration of Allan Crockford’s mastery as a wordsmith as it is a display of trippy musical wizardry.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the band’s career over the years. The Galileo 7 were, after all, the band who personified the inability to feel pleasure with their opening song ‘Anne Hedonia’ on their 2012 album Staring at the Sound.
Now that same skill in mixing the wit of wordplay with a sense of melancholia has re-emerged in the form of lines like ‘I was the apple of your eye/now you’re the onion inside mine’ (‘A Quiet Place’) and ‘when your walls start closing in/smash them down and I will bring/my list of trusty traders quoting for repairs’ (‘Blind Eyes Open’).
You, Me and Reality is an album full of loss, longing and searching for that undefinable… something.
This much is obvious from the first lines of ‘Can’t Go Home’, the record’s first song: ‘I could spend my time/just wondering why/there’s a void between us’. One way or another this album represents an exploration of voids and how to fill them, be they found in the midst of grief, break-ups or doing battle with the relentlessness of the daily grind.
From the stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off frustration of the Prisoners-meets-The Wondermints title song (‘time is unkind/we live in rewind/don’t let the world decide/we used to be different’) via the unashamedly pessimistic conclusion of ‘Blind Eyes Open’ that ‘we’re not the stars of our show/we don’t get our happy ending’, through to the ‘illusions of freedom’ found in the early-Floydian ‘Lazy’, this album is the strangest of things: a joyously hyperactive response to an embedded sense of ennui.
It's there in the disoriented panic of the Middle Eastern tinged ‘Slow Down’, sung by Viv Bonsell. It’s also there in perhaps the most important couplet from the whole album: ‘We never saw the blue sky over head/just did everything that they all said’, from ‘Rain is Falling’.
And it’s there at its most devastatingly poignant in ‘A Simple Man’, an ‘Eleanor Rigby’/’Plastic Man’ hybrid of a tune, which slowly reveals that the unsmiling man ‘scratching round to fill the day’, whose ‘clothes are clean but out of style’ and who has ‘pushed all his friends away’ is actually internally writhing in inconsolable grief at the loss of his wife: ‘he limps to her graveside/he won’t be beaten’.
There is a great deal to unpack in this self-assured exploration of sadness and psychedelia and its yearning to find ‘a quiet place for a last word/to find relief in a new world’.
It all makes You, Me and Reality an album that will demand repeated listens until it has rooted itself deep inside your soul. This album marks the beginning of what will prove a rich year of creativity from Mr Allan Crockford and Associates.
It’s all going to be rather exciting.
You, Me and Reality is out now on Damaged Goods Records.
2024 is already proving to be an exciting year for music in Medway. If you would like Local Authority to listen to your music, please get in touch via hello@localauthority.news.
In brief
🎖️ Tracey Crouch has been awarded a damehood for services to public and parliamentary duties. Crouch has been the MP for Chatham and Aylesford since 2010 and recently announced that she would stand down at the upcoming General Election.
🏦 Natwest is set to close its Rainham branch in July. With the ongoing march of progress, the number of people visiting has dropped 52% in four years, with the bank claiming only two regular customers use the branch on a weekly basis.
🥙 The former Chiquito location in Strood is set to reopen as a Turkish restaurant. The outlet in Medway Valley Park is scheduled to open in May.
⚓ BBC News has put together a great read on the reinvention of Chatham Dockyard since its closure 40 years ago.
139 homes proposed for former school site
The former St John Fisher School site in Chatham is being proposed for development after the school relocated to City Way in Rochester two years ago.
Since then, the original site has sat empty, leading developers Eutopia Homes to swoop in and draw up plans for a development consisting of 77 houses and 62 flats on the land.
This is one of those sites that was going to inevitably come forward rapidly, being a brownfield site located close to Chatham railway station. As Medway struggles to meet its housing demand, sites like this are akin to gold dust.
There isn’t anything hugely exciting about the development itself, though it does feel unique at this point to have a development that proposes building more houses than flats. It does feel in keeping with the surrounding area though.
Other things to note from the proposals are that the developer intends to retain the existing treeline around the site and that it is proposing an element of affordable housing but is being a tad cagey about exactly how many units that would consist of.
You can read more about the plans from the developer, with a formal planning application likely to be submitted in due course.
Hat tip to Future Medway for spotting these plans yesterday.
Tickets are now available for our Kent Police and Crime Commissioner debate ahead of May’s election for the post. All announced candidates have confirmed they will participate in the debate, where they will answer your questions on crime, public safety, the role of the commissioner, and more. Tickets are free, but booking is essential. When booking a ticket, you can submit a question for the panel, and we’ll be asking as many of them on the night as possible. We hope you’ll be able to join us.
Out to lunch: Koreatown
Steven Keevil assesses the lunch options available in our towns. This week, he ordered from Koreatown…
Koreatown is a fast-food outlet that appears to run out of what is known as a ‘dark’ or ‘ghost’ kitchen. This means there is no physical outlet, you can only order online, in this case via Just Eat.
Koreatown does not offer drinks, so make sure you have those available from elsewhere. We ordered a Koreatown Combo consisting of chicken wings, curly fries, and a side order of coriander slaw. Then, we waited. And waited. And waited. Whilst it may be considered unfair to moan about the delivery in a review of Koreatown, that’s the business model they decided on for supplying their food.
Which is a shame because when the food arrived, it was really good. The chicken wings, which had a spicy, crispy coating, were delicious. The curly fries, which naturally run the risk of being stodgy and undercooked, were crisp and flavoursome. They were served with buffalo mayo, which has a kick and compliments the meal. The coriander slaw was… fine.
Overall, Koreatown is recommended, but you are cautioned to be patient when ordering.
Events
🎸 Promoters Kicking Against Nothing are back at the Oast Community Centre in Rainham tonight (Fri 29 Mar) for their latest gig. The lineup features Ernest Graves, Queen Phosphene, and locals Punching Swans for an evening of loud and fast music. Tickets £5.
🛍️ Medway African & Caribbean Association are holding an Easter Market tomorrow (Sat 30 Mar) at the Corn Exchange in Rochester. Stalls selling arts, crafts, food, fashion, music, beauty, jewellery, photography, health treatments, home products, and more. Free entry.
🧛 Chatham Odeon is holding a one-off screening of the cult 80s vampire film The Lost Boys on Wednesday (3 Apr). Tickets £10.
More Authority
Our paid supporters receive extra editions of Local Authority every week, including our in-depth interviews with local figures. This Sunday, we are particularly excited to be publishing the first part of a two-part discussion with local artist, writer, musician, poet, and local legend Billy Childish.
An excerpt from the interview is below, and if you’d like to receive the full thing on Sunday, please consider upgrading your subscription.
What was it like coming down Rochester High Street and seeing a mural of you on the side of a building?
That's just a strange thing. The kid who did it did get in touch with me, and asked if I would mind them putting it up. I said, ‘It’s not really my call.’ I said, ‘I can't endorse it, but it's your work.’ I wouldn't want to deprive him of his thing. I mean, it's quite funny because people think I did it. I said, ‘Yeah, I'm raising funds to build a gold statue of myself as well.’ If I did a mural myself and put it on the high street, the modern generation think that's sort of cool. My generation would think you're a cunt. I like the fact that people think I would have the attitude to put it up. It shows how low their opinion of me is.
Would you support a Medway Childish Festival?
No, not really. I turned down some things. I'm not a fan. You know, when you were going to interview me, I don't know if you were told, I was trying to work out if you were part of the council. I don’t like supporting the council because the council only like supporting people who don't need support. They did an award for me or something, and I wouldn’t go for it. It has to be something where I thought there was genuine engagement. Same as when Celebrity Big Brother wanted to have me on. I hadn’t seen it. Wolf (Howard) showed me. I said, ‘Well, it's not really about anything, is it?’ They said, ‘We really want you in it. What would you need to be in it?’ I said, ‘I need you to know you can't pay anyone to do anything.’ I said, ‘But if you ever want to do a programme about something then fine.’ If the council had something genuine, I don't mind helping. If it should benefit someone somewhere, I might consider it, but I don't trust them. That's my problem. That's why I was trying to work out if you were anything to do with it. I did actually look into it. That was one of my hesitations.
Footnotes
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Music that soundtracked the creation of this edition: Let Go by Nada Surf, Do You Wonder About Me? by Diet Cig, and Death Club by Slime City.