One of the UK's dilemmas in past years was that all its best homegrown musical talent had gestated on the dole. Unemployment had given bands space to develop, time to reflect, and a burning ambition to escape the confines of an otherwise routine life (depending on where they grew up).
So when Tony Blair was crowing about Cool Britannia and inviting the Gallagher brothers to Number 10, he was also making their like extinct by ushering in draconian benefit cuts.
The legacy of such policy decisions is clearly evident today as now we mostly have bands populated by Oxbridge toffs like Keane and Mumford and Sons. Hey ho!
Back in the 90s, I was one such pre-Blair dole-ite soul. When the Dead Fly Studios closed its doors, I engaged in the quaint game of spending my time in creative activity (with Poisoned Electrick Head) whilst living on a pittance, then once a fortnight feigning an air of defeat and sub-intellect to sign for my sustenance. It was a cat and mouse affair, the canny approach being just to play along with every new incentive - Jobclub weeks, interviews, and eventually Work Placement.
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After a week of preparatory CV writing, workshops, and badly executed state brainwashing, we were offered a list of participating host enterprises. My pal and drummer Bill, was also in this intake of unmentionables (which alleviated the boredom factor immeasurably) and opted for Parks and Gardens, being an outdoor physical kind of guy and imagining (quite rightly) that it afforded many possibilities of bunking off for unscheduled fag breaks, between the leaf sweeping.
I myself opted for Arts and Crafts at the Community Centre (as PEH guitarist Phil was already there, producing items to be sold for charity. It was like 'Goodfellas', we all kept meeting each other in jail). It was the kind of work normally carried out by prisoners of her majesty (lowercase deliberate) or the mentally handicapped.
At this stage in time, we had collectively released two albums, one of which had charted at number 11 in the Indie Charts, alongside Nirvana and PJ Harvey, but we could not speak of this and had to play dumb; an act all-involved were happy to buy into.
Upon arrival in the Craft Room, I was shown the various activities, and introduced to one I knew little about having never tried it - Pyrography. The friendly but somewhat patronizing woman in charge of new inmates demonstrated this new art to me, by grabbing a scrap piece of wood and sellotaping a piece of paper onto it. The paper bore a crude image of an owl on it and I mean crude. She then took a machine, equally basic, consisting of a metal box with a cable attached to it. On the end of the cable was a pen-like appendage with a thin metal tip. On the box were a numbered dial and a big switch, which when she clicked it on, glowed red, as did the wire tip of the pen. She explained with great seriousness that the dial must always be set to seven. Always seven, not six, not eight, seven. She then commenced following the lines of the owl with the pen, the heat of the tip burning through the paper and onto the wood. Plumes of smoke swirled up as the red tip scorched its way round, and when she'd finished you know what was on the wood? A crude picture of an owl and I mean crude.
She handed me the tool and told me to get a feel for it for a while, so I grabbed an offcut and began playing with the device. Despite the ominous warnings, hordes of Satan's undead didn't rise up through the floor when I adjusted the dial, it simply made it hotter or colder. It was an odd thing, like a pencil but backwards somehow. If you kept it still it made a big black mark but if you kept it moving it you could create shading, slowing down to get darker tones. You could do dot-shading, lines, cross-hatching, but if you drifted off the smoke would float up and it was ruined. you could even blow on the tip to cool it down while you got your position. I was hooked.
I asked the boss woman if I could do my own design and she said sure, just photocopy a picture, they had carbon paper to trace an outline onto the wood. In my lunch break I went to the newsagents and bought a music mag (the now defunct 'Select' if I remember well). I scoured the pages and found a great black-and-white shot of The Prodigy's Keith Flint. Well, he's a firestarter I thought so why not?
Then I set to work, spending as long as I could on the tracing part despite itching to get to the burning stage.
As long as you were doing something they left you alone, probably figuring it kept you off the streets committing crimes and doing drugs, and somebody might buy your efforts, so I worked undisturbed for a few hours. After a while the boss woman came to check on me, "So how are you getting o..ooo...eeee..errr!" Then she bounded off and moments later came back with the manager of the Community Centre. They both stood staring at the wood and then at me. I was either a witch or the Jimi Hendrix of the pyrography tool. The manager then loudly announced that no one but me was to go near that machine for the rest of my stay, which I then passed happily burning away.
Ruth, Drink Me, Zappa, And Aladdin Sane
They gave me MDF to work with (a semi-synthetic chipboard material), the fumes of which, I've since discovered are carcinogenic, so there's a lawsuit waiting to happen when I get around to it.
Staff members of the building would come to me brandishing photos of family members, footballers, and pets, and I was free to create pictures for myself or for friends.
One bloke I knew in gainful employment, asked me to do one for his daughter, saying he would pay me what it was worth. Upon receiving it he asked me to furnish him with a supplier and a price for one of the machines and he would buy me my own. The center gave me the details and despite the seventy-quid price tag he didn't bat an eyelid, he just said I needed to have one, then went off and got it. This gesture of kindness, humanity, vision, and a host of other stuff has never been forgotten even if his name has (I think it was Keith, you've all met his like, unassuming, shy, heart the size of a planet) and I can't thank him enough.
So, irony of ironies, I came out of my work placement with a new skill, and despite the government rhetoric, that was NEVER their intention with these things, they just inadvertently picked on the wrong guy.
I've recently taken the pyrography up again, the old machine is still going strong after twenty-six years and at the time of writing this, I have a little exhibition in a few weeks of my work. Through internet groups, I even discovered that it can also be done on watercolor paper, as it's thicker than normal, (it's also a damn' sight easier to post) but my first love will always be wood.
