Rod Clements saw considerable chart success with folk-rockers Lindisfarne, penning their hit Meet Me On The Corner. Now a solo artist, he is currently recording a new album. Rod is proud to have worked with the late, great Bert Jansch, and he continues to collaborate with various other musical kindred spirits including Michael Chapman, Rachel Harrington and Rab Noakes. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s regular musings in which you’ll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE I consider myself lucky to have been ‘born at the right time’, missing National Service but able to enjoy the benefits of a shiny new welfare state, the heyday of rock’n’roll and the student grant system. Today’s students, saddled with the prospect of mountainous debt before they’ve even tasted their first pint, must look back enviously to a time when their predecessors were actually paid to go and spend three years away from home ‘studying’. I was even luckier than most: my student days were spent in Durham, less than an hour’s drive from home, which meant I could ‘study’ through the week and play with my band, Downtown Faction, at weekends. So I was able to squander my grant cheque on music gear and survive (just) on gig earnings for the remainder of the term. An unforeseen consequence of my extracurricular musical career was that I got roped into being my college’s social secretary with responsibility for booking the entertainment for various functions. It was a small college so my duties were not particularly onerous – one big dance per term, which necessitated booking a ‘name’ band of my choice from one of the national agencies, and a few smaller bar gigs. Needless to say, Downtown Faction made several appearances during my term of office. Several gigs stick in my mind. There was a Saturday afternoon in the bar when the Newcastle poet Tom Pickard came to give a reading, bringing with him two acoustic guitarists who accompanied him the whole time, improvising in open D tuning – the first time I’d come across it. The effect was mesmerising and I’ve been a big advocate of open D ever since. For the bigger events, I was spoilt for choice in the number and variety of bands available and I made the most of it. The very names evoke a bygone age of Transit vans criss-crossing a premotorway Britain, going from college to club, dancehall to dive bar on a nightly basis: Brian Auger & Julie Driscoll, Jimmy Cliff, Wynder K. Frogg, Happy Magazine – they all played in my college refectory, changed in my room (carefully selected for its proximity to the bar), and ate the tray of curling sandwiches I had coaxed out of the kitchen staff for them. Few people in the audience had heard of the bands I booked, but most went away happy. The one time I really stuck my neck out was for a band I hadn’t even heard, but what I’d read in Melody Maker sounded right up my street. I took a chance and got them for sixty pounds. They turned up with a dog, a large and friendly German Shepherd that stayed in my room throughout the proceedings and behaved impeccably. They also had a new girl singer who was so nervous that she performed with her back to the audience. It didn’t matter – they exceeded my expectations, combining inspiration and musicianship with that strange aura of otherness that great bands carry at certain times. The band was Fairport Convention and the new singer was Sandy Denny. The opening act was, of course, Downtown Faction. Both bands went on to greater success and considerable changes, but there is something about how we were, then, that I still regard as a standard to aspire to. I went back to my old college not long ago, and played a solo acoustic blues set to a small invited audience in that same room. Unlike the college gig circuit, it hadn’t changed a bit. It was full of ghosts, but at least they all seemed friendly.