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, with his band The Ghosts of Electricity, and in collaboration with other musical kindred spirits such as Bert Jansch, Michael Chapman, and Rachel Harrington. Last issue, we were delighted to recruit him to the pages of R2. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s musings in which you'll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE Recently I was invited to be the subject of a Desert Island Discs-type show for a local radio station in the south of England. Because the show was live and I would be on the road at the other end of the country, we agreed to do it “down the line” from a studio I could get to, communicating via the miracle of wireless technology. I picked my top ten and sent the list. Surprisingly soon the answer came back: fine, we’ve got all those. I stifled a vague feeling of disappointment and wondered if I’d been too obvious. So I presented myself at an address which turned out to be in a newly-built shopping mall on the edge of town. I hadn’t been to this new studio before, but I’d been to its predecessor a few times. It used to be in a big Georgian house in the city centre, with a room large enough for live concerts, a canteen with jolly dinner-ladies, and a bar for afterwards. But the powers that be sold the building off to be turned into an executive health club or something, and moved the operation out here, which is how I found myself explaining who I was to a box on a wall next to a glass door in an empty shopping mall. I was buzzed in. A uniformed security man, who appeared to have the place to himself, was watching the afternoon film on TV. He escorted me to a glass cupboard just across from his desk, handed me a pair of headphones, pressed a switch and left me to it, sliding the glass partition into place as he went. I put on the headphones. A voice introduced itself as Dave, the presenter of the show. We were going live immediately. After reading the news, Dave asked me to tell the listeners who I was. I thought he’d have told them himself, but as he didn’t, I began reiterating what I’d just said to the box on the wall outside. It was immediately obvious that there was a problem. My voice, which had sounded OK in the headphones before we went on air, now had a disconcerting delay on it, so I heard everything I said twice – once when I said it, then again a second later in the headphones. I had no option but to press on until the first music item. To the strains of Duane Eddy, I shouted down the microphone for Dave, but answer came there none. I tried to attract the attention of the security man through the glass, hoping his technical skills extended beyond handing over headphones and pressing the ‘on’ switch, but he’d got his sandwiches out and was engrossed in the film. Duane stopped twanging. Dave asked me about the next track. Again my voice came back to me a second later. I introduced Elmore James’s ‘Dust My Broom’ and on came not the classic slide guitar intro, but an unknown, dirge-like slow blues. I could feel the listeners deserting. The first off-air contact from Dave came during a Dylan song. They didn’t have any Steve Earle, what would I like instead? The limitations of Dave’s library were soon exposed, so we had another Dylan track. Afterwards, Dave apologised to me for not having all the right tracks. He’d only seen my list that morning. I told him about the echo on my voice and he said I should have told him earlier. The security man buzzed me out, his mouth full of sandwich. I wished there were still jolly dinner-ladies and a bar.