Rod Clements saw considerable chart success with folk-rockers Lindisfarne, penning their hit Meet Me On The Corner. He currently works as a solo artist and with his band, The Ghosts of Electricity. He also collborates with other musical kindred spirits and has worked with the late, great Bert Jansch, Michael Chapman, Rachel Harrington and Rab Noakes, among others. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s regular musings in which you’ll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when the tour rolled into Stoke-on-Trent and there was nothing to do but sit around the dressing-room while the road crew set the gear up. It was a situation with which most of us were all too familiar, but Randy the drummer was not happy and he was letting everybody know it. “If I was back home I’d be at the beach right now. Or in the studio. Do you know how much work I could be missing out on?” The rest of us hid behind our Sunday papers. Randy had been flown in from L.A. at great expense to add a bit of extra kudos to the line-up. He had delayed his arrival till the last day of rehearsals and immediately started telling everyone what to do. He made it clear that he was doing us all a big favour by being there, and expected five-star treatment wherever we went. Keith, the Welsh lighting roadie, entered the room eating an outsize chicken leg from a paper bag. Randy had never seen anything like it. “Jeez, what you got there?” “It’s a dog’s leg”, Keith replied casually, taking another bite. The rustling newspapers fell silent. “You guys eat dog here?” No-one breathed as Randy walked into the trap. “Oh yes,” Keith assured him. “I like a bit of dog now and again. You don’t often get it, these days.” Randy looked around the room for reassurance, but it was too late. A cruel telepathy had already decided how this would end. None of us would actually eat dog, we told him, though we certainly didn’t condemn Keith for doing so. Back in the old days, when times were hard - the war years, for example - people had to resort to such measures, and in a few backwaters the old habits had survived. Randy took it all in, wide-eyed and speechless for once. Every so often over the next few weeks, Randy’s doubts would resurface and he would take someone aside and ask them if it was true that we still ate dogs. And every time, he would be told: Not me. Not now. But back then... It was a story that lent itself to colourful elaboration, and we did it justice. What finally convinced him, though, was a chance encounter at a hotel bar in Hull. It was midday and we were sitting with our bags and instrument cases, waiting to board the bus. The bar was otherwise empty except for a couple of old codgers at the bar enjoying a lunchtime pint. Randy kicked off again: “I can’t believe you guys eat dogs here. What kind of people are you?” Frustrated at receiving the by now standard responses from the rest of us, he turned in a state of agitation to the old boys at the bar. “These guys here, they’re telling me you eat dogs in this country. Is that true? Would you eat a dog?” One of the men looked up from his pint. “Oh yes,” he replied with obvious relish. “There’s nothing like a bit of dog”. His friend gazed wistfully into space: “Long time since I’ve had a bit of dog.” Randy went home to L.A. convinced that everybody in the U.K. eats dogs, and the last time anyone I know heard from him, he still believed it. So if you’re ever out in California and you meet someone who believes that to be true, you’ll know the story started on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Stoke-on-Trent. It’s up to you whether or not you put them straight.