TWO MORE LUDICROUS SUGGESTIONS
Quiz question: In the world of popular music, what is the year 1967 particularly significant for?
Answer: Well, the release of Sergeant Pepper of course. And.…wait for it….the birth of NTP!!
Soon after Jel made his first ludicrous suggestion, we set about playing. More accurately, he set about teaching me how to play. I can’t remember how he did this…..
NTP SNAPSHOT
Walkwood
Behind Jeremy’s house there’s a field, where we play football, and beyond the field there's a wood, Walkwood, which will later become our good weather “rehearsal space”. We sit on a bench facing each other while he tries to teach me The Beatles’ And I Love Her.
It’s hard as it has a B minor chord, a bar chord, which needs your index finger to press down right across the fret board while the others make a shape above it. And made more difficult by my Spanish guitar with its extra wide neck! I’m amazed that Jel not only knows the chords and George Harrison’s lead break, but can also sing the words while playing Harrison’s arpeggio accompaniment at the same time. He’s a leftie, so I look at him playing his guitar upside down, his RIGHT hand making the shapes. I will always find it easier to follow an upside down left-hander….
After a few months of this - we’d meet for most of the day more or less every day in the school holidays - Jel came up with his second ludicrous suggestion. Let’s play live. LIVE?! And we’ll need a name. A NAME?! He was serious. After some discussion, he came up with NTP, a physics term meaning normal temperature and pressure. So that was us, NTP, born the same year as Sergeant Pepper, and destined to be just as big.
We started playing at parties, usually sitting in a corner with our acoustic guitars while everybody else danced and smooched to the hits of the day playing on a record player. It soon became obvious that we weren’t loud enough. And this was brought home when we were hired to play in a pub a few miles from Beaconsfield.
NTP SNAPSHOT
A nice, big pub. We find a couple of chairs and tune up. We’re well-rehearsed and play ok. Maybe half a dozen numbers in, we’re interrupted by the manager, holding out 30 bob (30 shillings, or £1/10s, now worth £30 or so).
“You’re very good, boys, I like what you’re doing. It’s a shame no-one can hear you over the juke box.”
So we buy a drink and then go home.
We were playing live, if not always actually heard, and enjoying it so much that Jel came up with his third ludicrous suggestion. Let’s write our own songs. Gulp! How do you do THAT?! You make them up, he said. Gulp! He showed me a chord sequence to strum and launched in playing a melody on his guitar. He called it Running Late and we recorded it on a borrowed domestic tape recorder, and sent it off to be made into an acetate disc.
NTP SNAPSHOT
Jel and I in a waiting room. It’s the office of a major record label. We’ve been waiting a while. A door opens and a man says, “Yes?”. “We’re musicians. Will you listen to this please?” He smiles and takes our acetate into the other room. After a couple of minutes he opens the door and we approach expectantly. He hands the disc back. “Thank you for letting me hear this…..but we do have The Shadows.” We get the train home wondering what The Shadows have that we don’t.
“Right, we’ll make an album.”
Fair plays to Jel, he isn’t easily put off.
Jeremy & Robert
So we made our first 10” album, entitled simply, and without much originality, NTP. Recorded on the borrowed tape recorder, the sound quality was nothing to write home about, but they WERE our songs and we were insanely proud of them.
I have no idea where we got our money from - maybe parents’ help, maybe proceeds from a few inaudible gigs. But by the time The Beatles released the White Album in 1968 we’d managed to buy a couple of amps - mine was called The Little Giant - and a mic set-up. NTP was loud….NTP could see off any record player….NTP was go….
STUDIO DIARY
Oct 1st 2024 Spent the day trying rough mixes of You Never Know. Want Lottie’s voices to be part of the texture in the verses, but further forward in the choruses. A difficult balance.
Oct 2nd Ellen texts that she can’t work tomorrow. My world is in tatters.
Oct 4th Lottie not free for a session, but Avvon coming to lay down the drum track (assuming he’s not ill, of course).
Oct 6th What?! Oh, no!!! Recording Avvon’s drums the other day, I now discover that I DIDN’T record the final take for the first verse. Maybe put it right next Friday….