Nelson and I both came out of Colchester, a roman cow-town about 60 miles northeast of London. We'd both been kicking around in various bands for years. Nelson had actually been in Modern English for a while and had toured America a couple of times. I'd had a major indie hit in Germany and it was inevitable that we'd eventually end up in the same band. He ended up playing bass with my band The Cleaners From Venus.
On the brink of having our third album released, I left the band and Nel came with me. We were both broke, it was late winter and we decided to become buskers. It has to be said that Nel is a good all-rounder and plays drums, bass, guitar and mandolin equally well. We hit on a modus operandi which involved me playing guitar and harmonica on lead vocals and Nel playing mandolin, or guitar with bells tied to his legs on second vocals.
We got ourselves an official buskers permit and soon enough were making a pretty convincing noise in one of the neo-Victorian shopping precincts which sprang up in England during the Thatcher Period. We were a kind of underclass, low-art service industry if you like. We did a professional job anyway. Both of us would dress up, leap around in the square and play the songs as best we could. Even in poverty we needed to be better than our nearest competitors.
As autumn rolled 'round, we started recording songs. Very slowly and just for fun you understand. I had a tiny room in an old fisherman's cottage. Since the old fisherman had died some years earlier he didn't interfere too much and soon enough we had a tape. This tape came to the attention of Andy McQueen and Capt. Sensible (a long time songwriting partner of mine) and they asked us if we'd like to do an lp. Low-budget, nothing opulent.
Captain lent us his old eight-track machine and painfully slowly we started writing and recording the tracks which are on this artifact you now see before you. I had a gardening round and Nelson, well Nelson was always in demand to sit in with this band or that band so we had to fit in recording whenever we could.
A typical Brotherhood of Lizards session would involve lots of swearing and cursing about leads not working. It also involved a lot of cycling. Nelson and I lived a few miles away from each other and we both liked cycling a lot. Sessions were fairly laid-back and involved a lot of laughter. There was an old bantam chicken in my garden and she used to get a bit miserable if it was cold and rainy so we'd let her sit in the recording room while we worked sometimes. Other times, the rabbit or one of the cats would be up scrabbling around under our feet while we were putting vocals down. It was all a bit rural with us Lizards. When we finished a session, we'd have a pint or two of home-brewed beer if I had a barrel on, or we'd wander round the twisty streets of my village to a pub. By late summer we had an lp and Andy McQueen said, "I don't suppose there's any chance you'll tour is there?"
I replied, "Yes. But only by bicycle." At first the record company thought we were joking but I'd already drawn up a plan. I'd worked out that with full busking-kit and rucksack frames converted to hold guitars, we could average thirty-five miles a day, hit a small town, do a radio station, a busking session, talk to the local press and maybe do a gig as well.
Thanks to a very bright and hard working pr woman called Caron Malcolm, the Green Tour was born. In early October we commenced our cycle tour around the southern part of Britain. Unknown to us, Britain and its media were on the brink of an uncharacteristic wave of eco-conscience. The press and t.v. seized upon us like hungry wolves. We had so much publicity we didn't believe it. Of course there was some cynicism. Were we really as Green as we looked? The answer was yes. We were both long-time vegetarians and lifetime bicyclists, so we came up squeaky green.
We were out on the road for a month and kept meeting t.v. crews. Because we were always on the move, we didn't realize how much attention we'd gathered until the end of the tour. We were lucky with the weather too - apart from the wind which resolutely turned against us whichever direction we cycled in. By the time we finished the tour, a large chunk of Britain knew who we were. At one point Eurythmics' Dave Stewart rang up our record company to ask, "Are those two lunatics on bikes anything to do with you?"
It was simply the best tour I ever did. It was brilliant fun. I can remember nearly every day of it. We had to re-stage bits of it for the press and t.v. people who'd missed us the first time. And all this for a little homespun album which cost us about £23.00 to record. We bumped into Captain Sensible a couple of times, we met Robyn Hitchcock. In fact we met all sorts of strange people, including the recently released Paul Hill of the Guilford Four who'd spent fifteen years in prison for something which he never did.
Of course, disaster struck. New Model Army needed a bass player. Someone remembered Nelson was a brilliant bass player and EMI rang up and offered him the job. I remember we were cycling across Salisbury Plain. There'd been a long period of silence on the road, which sometimes happens when you've been traveling on an arduous journey. I said to Nelson, "You're gonna have to take it y'know. They'll be able to pay you better wages and more regularly."
A couple of miles further along the road, Nel just sort of mumbled, "Yeah.....I know."
About March of 1990, The Brotherhood of Lizards busked their last busk and Nelson joined New Model Army. I toyed with the idea of replacing him but my heart wasn't in it really. He'd left the Cleaners From Venus out of solidarity with me, we'd busked on many strange streets for a couple of years and we'd done all that cycling together. It was over and I became a successful performance poet within a year.
The story is not over because about a year ago, my first solo lp "The Greatest Living Englishman" (Pipeline Records) came out. Would I tour it? Yeah okay. Now who should I get to play bass and mandolin? Well I did hear that Nelson just left New Model Army........
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Originally collected by the kind folks at the now-defunct Long Play Records.