Arachne in the UK
From music’s rotating speaker of obscurity, instrumental Medway garage-jazz for an imaginary film.
The James Taylor Quartet The Money Spyder RE-ELECT THE PRESIDENT, 1987
‘‘AT THE END of The Prisoners,
I felt quite defeated,” says organist James Taylor of the Rochester psych-revivalists’ August 1986 split. “I still wanted to play and do gigs though. I just needed to find a format to be able to do it.”
For Taylor, born in ’64 and a Hammond obsessive since seeing his uncle’s band as a six-year-old, that format would arrive via a circuitous route. A month after his old group’s demise, he speculatively recorded a Hammond-punk version of Herbie Hancock’s theme to the 1966 thriller Blow Up, with Prisoners bassist Allan Crockford, Taylor’s guitarist brother David and the latter’s bandmate in The Daggermen, drummer Simon Howard. Though its principal had moved to Sweden, in spring 1987 the track would be released on Taylor’s manager Eddie Piller’s Re-Elect The President label. Piller would also name the band. Soon, the 45 was getting airplay by John Peel.
Taylor, who’d spent a brutal winter in Stockholm, duly returned to London in April, reassembling the team to play the Limelight club, do a Peel session and record more tracks for May’s movie theme set Mission Impossible.
“We had hardly anything prepared,” says Taylor of that mini-album’s raw versions of Goldfinger, Mrs Robinson, Alfie and more. “We were trying to take things and Hendrix-ify them, he was the master for us. That explosiveness was our thing.”
But in Sweden Taylor had been writing original material, as had David. “I was collecting riffs and ideas and we were also scouring around for film,” says James. “Entertaining Mr Sloane, Alfie and Bedazzled were big for us. We also plundered bits of soundtracks we found late at night on BBC2.”
Taylor came up with the idea of an imaginary film soundtrack, whose title was sparked when he saw one such web-spinner in his mum’s garden in Strood, where he was living in a six-berth ’50s caravan. “It could have been a combination of Harry Palmer and Alfie, a bit of Bond, Get Carter too,” he says of the concept. “I think Michael Caine featured quite a bit. But we never actually came up with a proper narrative for a film.”
It was recorded intermittently and on a budget as May turned into June ’87, at several spots. Taylor’s mum’s spare bedroom was one. The band’s poky, smelly rehearsal space they called ‘the Hole’ in a tunnel under Rochester Bridge was another. Here they used fellow Medway rocker Billy Childish’s Revox 4-track recorder to tape rough, ardent performances. Keeping the drums and bass, guitar and organ were overdubbed at Woolly Studios, an 8-track/£30-a-day set up in Sheerness, where Mission Impossible had been recorded. Needing another six tracks, Piller sent them to another studio in Forest Gate, which, remembers Taylor, may have been owned by a disgruntled former member of Iron Maiden. “We didn’t want loads of mikes on the drums,” says Taylor of that last session. “We come from Medway, we have our own musical identity. And we knew the identity of what we wanted to create, which was that kind of filmic, mostly British, Hammond-y background music-but-not.”
A late-’60s British vibration, from the morning-after, Formica-and-fags cover art, emerges from the grooves. Driven by lean Hammond, David Taylor’s jagged, piercing guitar and Howard’s combustible drums, the all-instrumental tracks were rich in association, variously evoking frugging Swinging Londoners in clubs, a secret assignation on a park bench, a high noon stop-off in Spain, and more. Setting the mood, the opening title track, whose cymbalom-like melody was created using a key inside a grand piano, transmits an Eastern Bloc frisson of espionage.
“It’s that thing about being on the cusp,” says Taylor of these garage denizens playing jazzy film music. “You’re coming away from playing really explosive stuff and you’re trying to do something more.”
Thirty-four years on, however, confusion remains about the track names. “The titles are mixed up,” says Taylor. “You say, ‘We’ll put it right’, but you never do.” (With Taylor playing the album down the phone to check, it seems the real running order transposes the titles of Mr Cool’s Dream and The Spiral Staircase on side one, while side two actually runs: The Onion Club, In The Park, Buzy Bee, “Los Cuevos Pablo”, Midnight Stomp (The NEW Rhumba) and The Stroll).
The Money Spyder was released in October ’87, and the group signed to Polydor. In 1988
Wait A Minute, with its cover of the Starsky & Hutch theme, replaced the guts and grit with a smoother production. The original quartet would splinter thereafter.
Since then, Taylor has never stopped leading the band, through jazz, funk, library music and other organ-compatible grooves, on wax and on-stage. He still has a special fondness for his Re-Elect The President days. “That remains the golden period for me, and I’m incredibly proud of The Money Spyder,” he says. “Me and my brother were having an absolute blast. Once you get too much into the business and the money, you don’t half lose something.”
Serendipitously, the organist has been drawn back into that world. The week before MOJO made contact in December, he played Hammond with Billy Childish’s son Huddie’s band The Shadracks, on a cover of the theme from Bedazzled. “It took me back to that
Money Spyder period,” he says. “It felt exactly like being in the JTQ 33 years ago.”
Days later, the Audio Network got in touch. “They approached me to do ‘The Money Spyder 2’, using an orchestra and horns,” says Taylor. “It’s another filmic thing. I’m using that same zither sound. But what it doesn’t have is that punk, 18-year-olds-on-a-bottle-ofwhisky kind of feel to it. I told the record company that’s what it needs. I even said, Can we put Huddie’s band on there? Or the other thing to do is get the original band back on there. I’d absolutely jump at the chance to do it again. These are my people.”
“…that punk, 18-year-old-son-a-bottle-of-whisky feel…” JAMES TAYLOR