The Red Barn
posted by Alp at Sunday, May 21, 2006
21 May 2006
About this
Something unusual was happening in SW Wales when I was a child – subcultures, social experiments, naked hippies dancing around maypoles. I'm researching a PhD project into remembrances of things past - how our sense of the past informs our sense of self. This enquiry presumes that the past is not fixed, rather it is partly constructed through a shared or collective consciousness, which is why I’m inviting you now to share your memories of certain events, moments, and ideas. A childhood in Wales gave a lot of us a unique experience and a lot of the ‘hippy’ kids, I think, have a wonderfully insightful way of perceiving and interacting with the world. But we also have a very different past from many of our peers, and some ‘site specific’ hang-ups! There were some amazingly off-the-wall characters around and some pretty weird shit happened. I’d like to know which bits you remember, in words and photos. Some of this stuff might be sensitive, so if you are posting photos or texts or relevant transcripts or notes or poems or songs (you could scan them or send them to me ‘snail-mail’ – I will be very careful) onto this weblog please be aware of that, and do so with an open mind.Previous Posts
- Dave Winters’ plays (eg Golden Slumbers)
- May Days at Dolwilym
- The Shed
- Other people's children
- Boys in skirts
1 Comments:
No Strings Attached were a popular act at the Red Barn, an acoustic band featuring some zany humour that played twice a week for what semed like months. The sets lasted for up to three hours and sometimes more and every third set featured completely new material, much of it original and most of that written by Peter Oram. The band featured Peter (guitar and vocals) Heneage (guitar and vocals), Bill (bongos and vocals), Leslie, (vocals) and Dave (guitar and vocals).
The most vivid memory I have of both the Red barn and No Strings Attached was of Leslie and I falling apart on stage, helpless with laughter, for what seemed like 10 minutes, but was i fact oly about tem minutes. We had been left to our own devices at a practice session earlier in the week (always a bad idea), and I had made up new words to "Blind John the Guitar Man", a stirring sone of faith and love composed originally by Robert Hunter of Grateful Dead fame that was on our set list. My version was entitled "Blind Pugh the Child Molester", and we don't need to go any further with the lyrics here to get the point across. All harmless fun: well,. sick harmless fun I suppose if you want to put too fine a point on it. Anyway, the problem was once we launched into No Strings Attached's impassioned version of the original, Leslie and I flashed on the sordid version and cracked up. ANd every time we caught each other's eye after that, we went into uncontrollable giggles, tars streamng down the face and everything. Of course, we couldn't explain to anyone, including the other nband members, what the joke was, which only creased us up further. We were thereafter always positioned at opposite sides of the stage with our chairs facing away from each other. Never a good idea to have two Taureans in a band I suppose. I have a tape of a Red Barn gig somewhere, recorded on Gile's professional portable high quality reel to reel thingy. We were actually rather good, but you'll have to take my word for it...
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