Soul dessert
Rediscovered under obscuria’s floorboards: session aces play hot instrumental rock, funk and prog.
“You didn’t rehearse, they’d throw the music at you and you had to play it.” CLEM CATTINI
Ugly Custard Ugly Custard KALEIDOSCOPE, 1970
AS SUCH way-out Library Music catalogues as Jonny Trunk’s The Music Library and David Hollander’s Unusual Sounds have shown, background sounds-to-order frequently came wrapped in deranged cover art that would never have survived in the civilian pop world. Yet, when the sessioneers who played it defected to above-ground rock bands, they sometimes took the design aesthetic with them. Try the oddly taxidermised dog with boggly eyes on Hungr y Wolf ’s self-titled 1970 debut of brassy grooves (later recycled as Music For A
Young Generation on the KPM label), or the loopy comic strip livery of Shel Talmy-produced soul rockers Rumpelstiltskin the same year.
With vocalist Peter Lee Stirling, those bands also featured drummer Clem Cattini, guitarist Alan Parker and bassist Herbie Flowers. All seasoned session players with lengthy pedigrees, in 1970 they joined forces with organist Roger Coulam and recorded their one album as Ugly Custard. Its waterside detritus sleeve art spoke of its future status as the preserve of the beachcombers and metal detectorists of music (an alternative sleeve featured a scarred, naked homunculus with a spilled jug of custard).
Drummer Cattini had huge success in the early ’60s with The Tornados and went on to play on big sellers for Tom Jones, The Walker Brothers, Thunderclap Newman and more, while his 1970 credits included Edison Lighthouse’s Love Grows, Bob Downes Open Music’s Electric City and Sounds Nice’s Love At First Sight – a de-smutted cover of Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus. Parker, Flowers and Coulam all had day jobs in hitmakers Blue Mink. Yet with a new name picked as “a bit of banter”, the pull of the session was strong.
“At that time, people liked instrumental records,” says Cattini. “People kept asking us to make albums, and I think Alan Parker instigated that one. It ended up being that little team of us, and then also Alan Hawkshaw [the late keyboardist, writer and arranger, remembered on page115]. I think we produced it ourselves, at Pye Studios right round the back of Marble Arch, probably in about three three-hour sessions. Studio time was so expensive and hard to get, you see.”
Mixing Parker originals with purloined covers including Scarboro’ Fair and Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You, there was no time for messing around. “We just went in and did it,” says Cattini. “You didn’t even rehearse, they’d throw the music at you and you had to play it. Some of the Ugly Custard stuff, Alan Hawkshaw would write the basic parts, not note for note, but just a roadmap of where we start, the middle and where we finish, but we played what we felt the track needed, you know, off the cuff. Christ, they were so efficient. I mean, Alan Parker was one of the best guitar players I ever worked with. For want of a better word, he could read fly shit. Put a piece of music in front of him and that’s it, straight away.”
Straddling instrumental rock, folk, funk, psych and prog, the sure steps of confident players in tune with one another are ever ywhere in evidence on Ugly Custard. With hints of woodsmoke and peat, Scarboro’ Fair’s rustic mood changes gear into a rocking chase for organ and electric guitar before arpeggiated meditations kick in: a sombre and majestic Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You teases out the anguish (Cattini was in the running to join his fellow session aces Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones in Led Zeppelin, but is sanguine about the coincidence today). There are masterful Swinging London organ freakouts like the zigzagging Custard’s Last Stand, a Parker/ Hawkshaw co-write repurposed from the Hungry Wolf LP, and workouts in blues, Southern soul and, via a version of Buffalo Springfield’s Hung Upside Down, mellow West Coast rock. The tracks are linked by short, florid guitar motifs by Parker.
“I don’t think we actually deliberately did it that way,” says Cattini of the album’s complimentary flavours. “It’s just what came out. I think we were trying to go in the direction that would make a bit of money, basically!”
Such was Cattini’s busy schedule he can’t remember the album’s release, and Ugly Custard’s hoped-for impact would go unrealised. It would, however, be released abroad in various alarming covers, such as the Spanish release retitled Psicosis and a West German edition superimposing Christopher Lee’s Frankenstein over a Victorian doll.
“It could have taken off like Zeppelin did,” muses the drummer today, “but they had good management and there was nobody managing us. We never did any live work at all with Ugly Custard, with Hungr y Wolf or even Rumpelstiltskin. And the BBC didn’t like the fact that there were session men making records. You know, they should have told Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones and people like that then.”
Like his bandmates, Cattini returned to the session fray, and in short order played on hit songs including Clive Dunn’s Grandad (co-written by Flowers) and Middle Of The Road’s Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, as well as sessions for Slapp Happy, Lou Reed and, for Peter Noone’s Oh You Pretty Thing, David Bowie. He thinks he last worked with the other members of Ugly Custard in the early ’90s, before technology filled the space once occupied by sessioners, and is still in touch with Parker.
“We were all mates,” he says. “It wasn’t like The Kinks or whatever, there were no fights going on. It was mutual respect and a good camaraderie, and that’s what I miss now. Music is people playing together and feeding off each other. I’m not being blasé about it, but we did do that.”