Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

Howard Devoto - The Shadowy Years
Part 1 (Episode 1a)

Howard's Start

Howard returned in June 1983 with a trilby and a new batch of songs, he was now 31 and "Rainy Season" was the pre album single. Now to say I truly pissed off the folks at Sundown Records in Wolverhampton for weeks & weeks prior to the release of "Rainy Season" is a massive understatement. Once I read about the return of Howard I was like a dog with a bleeding butchers best bone. Day after day I'd sidle up to the desk at Sundown and say "Has Rainy Season by Howard Devoto come in yet?" I started doing this in early March, by early June they'd had enough. Finally the geezer at Sundown parted his shoulder length hair, peered into my sad flabby little face and said. "Look here kid give us your telephone number and we'll ring you when comes in." They did! I still went in each and every day though, just to make sure.

With a new solo career to be launched, for Howard there was deal of press & promotional work to do. In '83 the new(-ish) music mag on the stand was the colourful, glossy and outrageously vacuous Smash Hits. A music mag in colour, with loads of piccies of wanky band members brushing their teeth and shit? No newsprint for the fingers - no in depth interviews - no political debate - nothing to make you think - A format that will never catch on? - Oh right it did.

Well the most unlikely candidate for the Smash Hits treatment at any time in any year would I guess have to be Howard Devoto. But here it is, the whole interview in all its insightful glory - blink and you'll miss it. It's as thin as an emaciated razor blade, but very, very, very, NICE!

And then finally it arrived - "Rainy Season" was placed in a plastic sleeve & pinned on the wall in Sundown Records in Wolverhampton, and another was taken from the pigeon hole behind the counter and shoved in my eager mit. The reviews in the press had been good, it had been described as "anthemic", "excellent" (by Smash Hits - tee hee) and Dave McCulloch described it as "the brilliant, teeming Rainy Season". But what did I make of Howard's new incantation? The title and sound seemed to make it a close relation of "About the Weather", it had Dave Formula on keyboards and it was released thru' Virgin - so some things had stayed the same - it seemed like a single step forward - but one thing was for sure "Rainy Season" certainly wasn't "Permafrost".

And what did "Rainy Season" have to say about the album to follow. Now Dickens wrote in Great Expectations "there is no deceiver like a self deceiver". And in the dark distant days of my late youth I was still fooling myself that I could predict the quality of a forthcoming album by the quality of the single that preceded it. If both the A side and B side of a single were stellar and neither appeared on the new LP it was a massively good sign that the album would be a goodun. This thought process was necessary, dole money wasn't vast in '83, but it was also a theory that led to some seriously tragic purchases. Of course it must be remembered that in '83 there were no scratch and sniff previews on myspace and only a very limited shaky radio play. Yes there were music paper reviews aplenty in those days with Melody Maker & Record Mirror & Sounds & NME all in full operation - but hey, when did anyone ever take any notice of reviews in the music rags? SEE LATER.

"Rainy Season" had brought an end to two years of Devoto drought, I applied my theory. The B side of "Rainy Season" was just an instrumental version of the A side, and "Rainy Season" was on the forthcoming LP. My theory was inconclusive, more research would need to be done. Howard was going on tour prior to the release of his new LP, I bagged myself a ticket.

Post Script: Too many gigs, too much ale and sporadic skirmishes with chemical concoctions have made my brain less than reliable. Singularly distinct moments have been crushed into a single happening. One of those moments that is logged incorrectly in my diseased memory is the Reading Festival in 1983. It was the end of August 1983 and the LAST EVER Reading Festival (What d'you mean it's still going?). I was there to reacquaint myself with two old former allies The Stranglers and Steel Pulse, who'd toured together some years before. It didn't go well, not for Steel Pulse anyway, who were mindlessly bottled off by the ROCK DRONGO'S. The boys in blue were at Reading in ridiculous numbers too that year - the plain clothed undercover vice squad bods pouncing on anyone who they didn't fancy the look of. But when I say plain clothed and undercover they weren't in reality either, coz they were all wearing a standard pair of gleaming Home Office issue green wellies. Easy to steer clear of, so obvious they might as well have kept the tits on their heads.

Now as far as my mind is concerned I'd not seen Howard Devoto play live by the time I went to Reading in 83, and the album "Jerky Versions of the Dream" had not yet been released. But of course neither is true. And in point of fact all that I've written so far is bollocks because Howard hadn't returned in June 1983 at all - you see what you get for believing the remembrances of an unreliable mind? Howard actually returned to live and vinyl action a month earlier in May 1983 vocalising with Bernard Szajner. So we better go there next in Episode 2 of Howard Devoto The Shadowy Years Part 1. However before I go let me leave you with my abiding memory of Reading Festival '83, lying back on the flat green green grass beneath the weak British Summer sun listening to John Peel kicking off proceedings with Rainy Season by Howard Devoto. The track was blasted out large and loud around the site, it was warm, there was fine musical prospect ahead, life was sweet.