Mark Alleyne 2005
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2 Interview ~ 2005 SO WHO IS MARK ALLEYNE? And what does he do? What colour socks does he wear? Well, if Ant fans have been paying attention to the recent Ant Remasters releases, they will know he’s responsible for bringing us a fantastic looking set of CDs, presented in a rather nifty red box. Last year we spoke to Marco Pirroni and Andi Vaughan and it seemed only natural to pin down the third and final member of the team behind the most exciting Ant releases for over 10 years. You were a roadie for the Ants and the Monochrome Set. When was this? I didn’t roadie for The Ants. I roadied for a post-Ants band John [Bivouac] Beckett and Mark [Kid] Ryan put together, round about 1981 ~ 83, and then The Mono- chrome Set 1983 ~ 85. I should probably point out that The Monochrome Set would never have admitted to having anything as vulgar as a ‘roadie’. I was their ‘travelling companion’. I think they saw me as some kind of precariously tempered, shoddily turned-out ‘batman’. How did you become a roadie? Early in ‘81 I was designing a poster for some theatre group or other and was recom- mended a printer in Covent Garden. I pitched up there and was discussing the job with the print shop owner, whom I thought looked vaguely familiar. I was pleased as he seemed to know his stuff, which was pretty useful - because I had very little idea of the technical side of print. The poster was quite funny - it had cherubs hurling atomic bombs about, I remember. For some reason talk turned to music and I men- tioned that I had been quite into Adam And The Ants, a little-known art-punk outfit currently taking the pop world by storm after some personnel changes. The penny dropped. “Oh, yeah - I did a bit of guitar for The Ants”. Of course he did. I was talking to Johnny Bivouac. The thing that’s easy to forget about those times was that if you liked a band it wasn’t really like being a fan at all - you didn’t really take too much notice of who played what, whether the singer was pretty or not - all that mattered was the noise they made, how they came across. Whether or not they embodied some aspect of the Impending Apocalypse. Ha, ha. Of course, The Ants did. Interview ~ 2005 3 I think John was pleased that someone remembered what he’d done - it’s always pleas- ant to have people appreciate your work. He said we should meet up later in the week for a beer. We did, and he brought along Mark Ryan with whom he was playing and writing occasionally ‘to keep our hands in’. We became quite mates, and when they started recording and gigging around a little more seriously, it was just obvious for me to roadie for them so we could just hang out, travel around together - and get free beer! We just fell into it. I would make up intro tapes for them to come onstage to - Hindi film tunes segueing into ‘Wunderbar’, or the theme from ‘The Avengers’ slamming into something equally inappropriate. It got the audience’s attention. When Andy Warren left The Ants in October ‘79, a lot of The Ants crew would turn out to see The Monochrome Set. Not only had Andy joined on bass - replacing Jeremy Harrington - but Spider [AKA ‘Longfellow’ or ‘Long’], who’d worked for The Ants during ‘78, was now roadying for them. So it was kind of like a home from home. Re- ally violent gigs for such a well-mannered outfit, I remember. When I stopped going to see The Ants after the Invasion Tour in 1980, I’d still go to every London gig The Monochrome Set played. We knew people in common, and I fell into going backstage to say ‘Hello’ and drink their rider after each gig. Andy eyed me suspiciously for some months, but didn’t do anything other than nod a cursory acknowledgement when- ever we met. It later transpired that he was fascinated by the fact that not only did we wear the same leather Luftwaffe gloves during cold weather, but also smoked the same white-tipped Ligget & Meyer cigarettes. Once he was sure this was coincidental shared taste and not some proto-stalking symbolism, he invited me to accompany The ‘Set - “You eat all the food and drink all our beer anyway - you may as well earn it”. So I did. So followed a couple of years of getting paid to hang out with one of my favourite bands - until we returned from a UK tour in 1985, when I decided I’d had enough of roadying, they decided they’d had enough of each other, and disbanded - for a while. What did it (roadying) involve doing? You know, roadie stuff. Humping gear about. Building and breaking down drum kits. Enforcing ever more strict and ludicrous riders. Making up numbers while attempt- ing to forcibly extract the gelt from the local tight-arse of a promoter. Keeping the van driver awake coming back from Dundee at three in the morning. Attempting to ‘pull’ ‘chicks’ while attempting not to appear to be attempting to ‘pull’ ‘chicks’ [not pulling them was easier, and had a near 100% success rate]. You know - these weren’t 4 Interview ~ 2005 The Rolling Stones here, or even The Bay City Rollers. Let alone Adam And The Ants. How long did you do this for? On and off between 1981 and 1985. How did those roles differ for each band? Well, The Monochrome Set were a more successful act, so there’d be better hotels, better riders, more money and a slightly more attractive class of ligger, but other than that, roadying is roadying is roadying. I mean, we did some good stuff on the road - Channel 4’s ‘The Tube’ sticks out in my mind, meeting a tearful Dave Berry - so touched that we youngsters even knew who he was - in Sheffield’s Leadmill, and a VE night in Hull [don’t ask]. At times it could have been incredibly boring but I really quite liked most of the people involved, and - as I said earlier - it’s great to be a young guy getting paid to hang out with your favourite bands. It’s not work on that level. Kids don’t really seem to do it much these days. Maybe they’ve got better things to do. You designed the motif that appeared on the Clannad ‘Legend’ album in 1984. It’s similar to Adam’s Strip logo from around the same time. Is that just coincidence? Yes. By that time I had no interest in what Adam was doing. I was a 23 year old ex- punker and ‘Strip’ was aimed at, and intended for, 13 year old girls. I wasn’t meant to be interested. And I wasn’t. I probably didn’t even see the album until it had been out for six months. My copy is a promo copy found in Notting Hill Record And Tape Exchange for fifty pence, bought at the time out of some kind of residual-knee-jerk- reflex-dumb-consumer-loyalty. It came in handy though - the sleeve was the source of the remaster cover, as the original photograph by Allan Ballard had evidently long gone walkies. So no, the Clannad motif had nothing to do with ‘Strip’. While I was roadying, I was also pursuing a proper job as a graphic artist. I trained for a while under Rob Interview ~ 2005 5 O’Connor [who subsequently art directed ‘Vive Le Rock’] and I did the ‘Robin Of Sherwood’ woodcut motif for him. Was the Clannad motif made for the group, or was it connected to the ‘Robin Of Sherwood’ TV series, which the album was the soundtrack for? Rob was designing the packaging for the TV soundtrack album, and I created the motif under his direction. As far as I can recall, Rob was commissioned by the record label who were coordinating the approvals and permissions of both the TV produc- tion company and Clannad themselves. For what it’s worth. You designed the sleeve for The Monochrome Set’s ‘Trinity Road’ (1995). How did that come about? Andy Warren came to see me and said “We’ve just recorded an album for Cherry Red. Would you like to do the cover?” Normally their guitarist Thomas Hardy [Lester Square] took care of their design requirements, particularly after the band reconvened in 1989 or 1990, but this time, for whatever reason, they wanted me to do the sleeve. What inspired you? After I agreed, Andy and I got down to the serious business of discussing what exact- 6 Interview ~ 2005 ly the album was about. Having drunk several bottles of Italian red, as was our wont, and having got no further than the album title [which was by no means finalised at this point] referring to a long-time disused London Underground station near where Andy and Bid [The Monochrome Set’s singer/guitarist] grew up, I decided to go my own way with it. Having spent most of my life in and around central London, and from my early teens travelling on ‘the tube’, I was used to catching rare glimpses of these derelict underground train stations up some unused spur of track - with adver- tising posters from the ‘thirties or ‘forties still discernable on the walls - when the train I was on stopped for some reason or other between stations.