Oggy

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars (The other side of the Screwdriver)"

Oggy Oggy Oggy! (an adventure into futility and a lesson in practicality).

"you are far too ugly to ever be a star"... (David Walker, Handle Artists 1980)

My adventures with The Oggy Band were the days of my stage keyboard playing. Apart from that, if you found me on stage at any other time, it would be playing guitar (naturally enough). The exception to that would be the time I spent playing fretless bass (my second favourite instrument to ukulele). The first of these periods was with The Ankh Band (a fairly miserable and thankless, unpaid task).

The second occaision was in "Silver Quarter" - a seven piece show-band style combo that I gigged locally with around 2006. A truly fabulous band, sadly no more. Those gigs more than made up for all the previous dire nonsensical time-wasting bollocks through the 70's and 80's. If you were witness to any of that - so s-a-a-a-a-a-r-y is all...

In 1966, the name "Oggy Band" was coined by me in total ignorance of the existence of "Oggy" as a real word in common use. I thought I'd made it up. We couldn't understand why people shouted stuff like "Give us a pastie!", in Cornwall as we drove by in our bandwagon, conspicuously signwritten with the name. If we'd made it to Wales it would have been another story, again. We had a mascot, a little Oggy character doll (artist's impression to left, below), which I carved out of foam rubber and which eventually got lost by the wayside along the road somewhere - a bit like the much later, much more expensive version. This doll, though, just literally fell out of the van.

There's not much more to tell about the amazing Oggy Band, except that it ended when guitarist John McCairn, bass player Martin Clarke and drummer Stuart Fordam all joined John Walker as The Technique band in late 1966 (described in the Hendrix chapter).

Skipping forward a few years to 1979, I'd started doing work for Status Quo the previous year. Pip Williams was producing and noticed that I could play a bit of guitar each time I handed back one of their axes all "race-tuned" - (fixed and playing properly in tune).

Together with his associates at the time, they listened to tapes of my then current band, "Joe" and thought the only way forward was to sack the band. The consensus was that although the energy was there and the drummer, Barry Fitzgerald was cool, they quite rightly saw that the bass player was a bit of a novice, and having some experience of needing to disguise poor quality bass playing, "gave him the thumbs down" and that was the end of "Joe", the band.

My response was to reluctantly comply with their suggestion but, having just heard Herbie Hancock's fabulous vocoder hit disco single, "I thought it was You", I laid down the condition that I get a vocoder to use so that I could automatically harmonise my songs with a more modern sound.

The 1981 version

Pip did just that (bought me the machine) and I soon began to practice with the Korg VC-10 machine I then got my grubby little mits on. Later we got a Roland 330 Vocoder Plus and the quality of diction was a lot clearer but among the first demos I made with the Korg were two songs, "Supermouse" (here a dreadful low-fi copy - and the original wasn't too clever) and "Maurice the Mole", no copy of which now exists in my possession.

The studio version of "The Rubber Band Song" was produced by Pip Williams (but I was left with a poor quality cassette copy only), along with another track for the Oggy Project, The Suburban Clog Dance. On Soundcloud this is labeled as "Vocoder Clog Dance" here represented more like the way it was supposed to sound, with full-on synth pulse and vocoder to the fore. As intended, there is no human voice mixed in, apart from Pip Williams' spoken count in and Kit Hain's rebel "Whoop!" at the fade. Bob Jenkins played drums (bless him). Original lyric here. This could have been a success but it wasn't broken - so between us, we fixed it anyway.

The result was what was released on record and I hated with a vengeance: - "The Remixed Clog Dance" of which there have been many other versions recorded. Another one is here. The lyric was mostly changed too, completely away from the original which was considered too "over the top" even for the secretaries at Handle to handle. Moral? Stick to your guns.

Both Bob Jenkins on drums and Pip Williams producing were tremendous assets towards coaxing something decent out of what we were trying to do, here photographed at one of the Clog Dance studio sessions while Kit Hain stamped on a plank for the genuine clog effect.

This photo always reminds me of Leonardo's Last Supper fresco painting which, like Humpty Dumpty co-incidentally, also fell off the wall...

Ever since the song's first beginnings there had always been "The Rubber Band Faeries" (left) . They were conceived as "flying salt pots" - little rubber band-retrieving robots but Oggy developed through several graphical incarnations before he arrived at the format for the toy that Bendy Toys Ltd., would prototype and tool up for mass production. His pets and other little helpers, like the "Snallops" (right) which were space slugs who liked to play "Pass the blob". (Mouse over gives them a wee rest). Be gentle.

"The Clog Dance" went through some strange manifestations of presentation. To begin with, Pip had invited me to his house to "routine" another song "The Kangaroo Hop" (here a later studio version), using his home tape machine - a Revox. I only had the germ of an idea for the rhythmic structure of the "Clog Dance" and no lyrics beyond a title. That rhythm went like this: - (sample). There was a copy of that strumming pattern on the cassette of Kangaroo Hop that I had with me. Pip's ears pricked up when the tape ran on and he asked me, "What is that?"

David Walker, Pip's manager at Handle Artists, had decided that I was "far too ugly to be a star", so having seen some of my artwork and knowing of my practical hands-on skills as a guitar maker, suggested that we invent another kids' animation concept, like The Wombles (which he'd missed out on). I already had the Oggy doll idea and to begin with, I created some scenarios wherein the family of bulbous Oggy "animals" could be placed for adventures but the whole format was due for some major shake-ups....

I was still imagining the main character to be the same creature I'd designed for The Oggy Band back in 1966 and with no more plot than just a dance (and given that he would wear clogs) I started drawing crude stoyboard images (e.g., left).

The ideas were certainly coming thick and fast but the money wasn't. This was a time of no guitars at all in popular music. The synth was all we got to hear in the charts and my business as a guitar craftsman was teetering on the edge of an extinction event. The roof was falling in on my cottage and my wife and I were really struggling, even with the tiny mortgage we had. Getting the fare together for a taxi or even a train to London was difficult but I was being "Handled" by wealthy people. All that again.

Dreaming of a cult following and a string of hit records (of course), and completely blown away by the prescence of my rich and famous customers for my guitar technician services, I made a wrong turn. I thought that because they all met in the same studios and offices that I was working with some kind of team. The first demos I made on a friend's multitrack (Bob Suffolk - Fabulous Poodles), instead of being played to Pip Williams were played to Alan Crux (Quo's management) instead "Cruxie gonna be there soon" - the line from "Living on an Island".

A genuine and innocent mistake but a resounding clanger, nonetheless. too.

If it had been just about guitars it might have been alright but complications are complications. Not my fault, I insist. I was just a guitar maker who liked to make music and who also had a lot of other complex stuff going on in his head at the same time.

Like this typical page from a notebook from that era. On these pages (left) are the kind of freehand engineering stuff I was doing all of the time, trying to work out designs for hardware for novel kinds of guitar technology. Here, the problem to be solved was a spring-loaded tremolo system that used a coil spring like a Bigsby does but with a perfect action. This meant allowing the spring to decide its own pivot fulcrum angle so to avoid twisting the axial line and thus decreasing sensitivity.

Like I said, complications are complications.

Work had virtually stopped on "The Rubber Band Song" as it dawned on David Walker and Pip Williams that we had the chance to build the beginnings of a substantial portfolio of potential hits. What wasn't understood by Handle Artists management was that I really hated the idea of mixing in my natural singing voice with the vocoder - to my ear the two sounds clashed badly. My fault? Wrong key - but how was I to know? Mixing vocoder with natural voice was totally foreign to me. And frankly, my dear, it didn't work. (more)...

The whole project seemed out of control. Nobody trusted my artistic judgement, constantly labeling my ideas as "over the top". That was the automatic knee-jerk reaction to anything I suggested. The safe and conservative choice was the only option as far as Handle were concerned but I knew that kids love the world of the weird and the strange. I was all for Oggy having flying saucers to mess about in (of course) and having just returned from a holiday in Crete was blown away by the Minoan civilization - a huge influence on my life for years to come.

Here are some early Oggy transition sketches with a chorus line of little flying robots who are there to look after the interests of rubber band owners and losers of elasticity everywhere...

To begin with the clogs were of the traditional Dutch design - with pointy turned up toes but after Crete they took on the profile of the Minoan shield. He was also going to be using a magical double axe in his adventures too.

Feelings were fraught in the Oggy camp and I was spending many hundreds of hours in the development of graphics, story lines and music, without any income. The guitar business was dead in the water and socially, for someone who was known to be rubbing shoulders with the stars, the situation was uncomfortable and it became embarrassing just to walk down the street. One day I spat out my dummy and walked out of the Mayfair office, throwing a hissy fit with the frustration of it all and had no contact with Handle for some months.

When I returned, I had completely re-designed the main character and given him a new family. In the interim period, I'd tried to live with conventional employment for a while in my old trade (screen process printing) and realised that I could never do that all over again. That gave me the kick-start to put all my efforts back into Oggy to try to make it work. I presented Handle with the new corporate identity and they loved it. The new Oggy family lost its cat, "Fizzle" (my own real cat's nickname, "Debussy Cat" at the time), replaced with a small green dinosaur of the same name. The Old English Sheepdog (my Beethoven), "Grizzle" in the song, was left out of the plot entirely.

It was a tough decision to lose the dog and cat, as they had both been the subject matter of the lyric, "Grizzle come Fizzle, come follow my whistle!" in the Clog Dance. The scene depicted here (right) was something that I had actually witnessed in the kitchen of my cottage. The cat would gnaw on the dog's bone behind his back and this presented an allegorical scene to my mind, parallel to the state of civilization and pretty much the universe too.

"Can you see a pussy cat chewing on a doggy bone, doing the Suburbian Clog Dance? I can see a pussy cat chewing on a doggy bone, watching Suburbia burn".

Once the newly designed family was accepted by Handle, David Walker approached the Bendy Toys company to get them involved in what seemed to be a viable childrens' T.V. animation series. Apparently a number of television companies were keen to assist the launch, notably the newly fledged Channel 4. Also an animation film company called Film Fair were approached, who had previously worked on the Wombles (remember this was a long time before C.G.I. was commonplace). I had a couple of meetings with their chief animation artist and, despite his portfolio work being proof of his genius, it lead us (and Oggy) nowhere at all.

Besides setting several movements of Handel's Water Music to new Oggy lyrics, I became very busy on storyboarding for the project. Depicted at right is a domestic scene in the Oggy household, where his girlfriend "Peggy" (of various undecided names) has picked up an entry form for a clog dancing competition whilst out shopping. Oggy has already filled in the one he's cut from the newspaper and is ready to post it. Fizzle eyes up the shopping...

"Great Minds Think Alike"...

Among other things in the shopping bag, Peggy has bought lemons. Fizzle likes a number of things, one of which is a good lemon - and they soon disappear (mouse over)...

There's one other thing that he's really keen on too, which is an old wind-up record player, which he will watch for as long as it takes for the spring to wind down.

I really thought we were starting to go somewhere when Bendy Toys came on board but the prototype they made from my first new drawings was simply hideous, in my opnion. It was an unoriginal stab at a "Disney-esque" dwarf. So my next move was to spend a few days with their sculptor to find out what I needed to give them in the way of a 3d model to mould from.

Their technician was really helpful and friendly. I came away with some knowledge of mould making and set about creating a doll more in keeping with how I saw it going in context with the storyboarding I was visualising. First, I made a plasticine model, then a plaster mould from that allowed me to fill with expanding polyurethane foam to produce a home-made bendy toy.

The annual Toy Fair Exhibition at Earl's Court was coming up and there was a rush to get the real production samples on display. Bendy Toys, to be fair, pulled out all the stops to meet the deadline and the office of Handle Artists in Derby Street, Mayfair was swimming in dolls, all dressed up in their little blue jerkin suits. The idea was that Handle would be able to hand out free dolls "willy-nilly" broadside to the record industry, along with the first record pressing.

When the Toy Fair Exhibition opened, it was my mission to go and see our hero on display at his "International launch". When I arrived at Earls Court Exhibition Centre, the toy fair was in full swing but Oggy wasn't. There was supposed to be a full-on display of dolls and graphics, with the animation company reps and T.V. people that I had been led to believe were all hot for it and were, for sure, all going to be there. No-one was there. There was one Oggy doll hanging on the corner of the Bendy Toys stand as though strung up from a gibbet. And nothing else. No information, no graphics and and no-one except the C.E.O. of Bendy Toys, looking mildly embarrassed.

It gets worse...

Poison Alert!

Toxic Plastic!

It was then revealed that the prototype demonstration model dolls that had been supplied to be promotional samples had been made in toxic plasic, totally unsuitable for distribution among record company executives' children. Dohh!!! There's co-ordination!

To say I was pissed off is just wrong. It doesn't begin to express how bad I felt about the whole thing. At the time I was getting an ear-bashing from the ego maesters themselves and was close to a breakdown, I think, considering I now know exactly how that really goes. I tore back to the office and had a stand up blazing primal soul scream at David. Which made no impression at all. But he did close the door.

In my frustration with the way everything had been going, in the meantime, I had previously asked Andy Scott of Sweet (also under Handle management at the time) to re-mix The Kangaroo Hop with me, using a Casio VL-Tone to overdub a kind of random twittering track. Random twittering just about sums up the whole episode.

Handle Artists David Walker had been holding out for more and more money from any prospective record company and in the death, formed his own: - the "Taurus" label. Now E.T. The Extra-terrestrial, was out and all attention turned in exactly that direction and away from any other commercial merchandidsing doll-type opportunities. I needed someone on my side and a valiant knight in shining armour arose from among my mates to say a few well chosen polite words on my behalf. At lunch with Benny Gallagher - who was also a good guitar playing customer of mine asked what was happening with Oggy. He didn't like what he heard at all.

Benny kindly voluteered to meet with David Walker at Handle Artists to try to sort out what was going on. The deal I had been struggling with was restricting and prohibitive to anything else I wanted to do with my musical "career". Benny was riding high at the time as Simon and Garfunkel had just covered one of his songs in the U.S.A. and he quite simply told David that he was taking the piss and to let me go.

So what did I learn from Oggy? Decision by committee is rarely a good thing and it certainly didn't work in the case of poor old Oggy. The record (sleeve artwork below) was released by David Walker, under his newly formed (just for the purpose) record label, Taurus.

It got some B.B.C. airplay but E.T. got a whole lot more, naturally. Hanging out for a better deal had stalled the whole Oggy project and ultimately killed it.

Oggy Oggy Oggy...

2,000 pressings of the 45 r.p.m. disc. Probably not collectible!

Appendix to Oggy...

When Pip had loaned me his Revox quarter-inch tape recorder in 1980, it meant that I could start learning a little bit about recording overdubs to my own stuff for the first time since the days of two old Grundig machines that I used to record stuff with Peter Frampton, as a 14 year old schoolkid at my mum's place in Bromley in 1965. Peter was a pretty hot guitarist even then. While we were messing about with tape recorders, bouncing tracks between machines, I built him a 12 string acoustic. It was pretty crude with a half-inch square rod of mild steel running through the neck and heavy, of course - but quite playable.

Also rescued from a fifth-generation cassette tape is another example of this period of output, was when a long term customer and buddy, Steve Prior, now Steve Jay (Facebook), came over for some adjustments to his bass and I got him to squawk nastiness onto a spoof punk rock track I had put some backing together for. His particular blend of throat-gravel was purrrfect for the nonsense I was trying to squish out into the world of brow-beaten and severely troubled musical ether... Offensive and obviously meant at some stage...

Into that space I had always hoped to inject some of my straight rhythm guitar playing as I knew that was my strongest asset. My singing voice has never been particularly good but it seems to work for some people in jingles, particularly (more on that later). The first major problem I encountered once equipped with overdubbing facilities (a la Les Paul), was that goddamned temptation to overstuff the turkey. For example, this guitar piece is the basis of a song concept called "Festival". When I first attempted to produce a synthesized version with multiple instruments, I got this mess of "fizz". Strings are my thing, not keyboards. Learn, you fool!

For me to be in any way lively and agile on a keyboard, I am really forced to be quite content to do it the way I know I can be in complete control - and that is by losing the keyboard completely and instead, programming the exact number of the beast: - I speak'um fluent MIDI language, just as long as you are talking 96 clocks per crotchet. (Non technical minds look away now). That is, I never saw any point going any finer than that. The Yamaha QY20 was my bosom buddy for several years and it was my "classroom in musical numbers". Here's a couple of pieces done entirely by keystrokes on a pocket calculator-sized computer sequencing lump of plastic and sand; the QY20. "Advice From The Wizard" - and "Overture", parts of a half-hour orchestral suite composed by midi numbers, mostly while out walking my dogs. Here, in mp3 format.

The temptation is overwhelming to include here some other real bloopers: - the first one is of my own personal trophy capture and comes from a session I was asked to produce for a local Kentish "Hill-Billy" country singer (small 'c') and his wife, who liked to sing in unison octave, of all things. Yuchh! I managed to pull together some useable musicians to do his backing for a number of tracks for sale on cassette at his gigs. This was captured on a pocket dictaphone micro-cassette recorder from the monitors in the control room at the session. I call the track "Long John Shockingbrain".

Another blooper here is in reference only in that it is an internationally known excercise in embarrassment, namely "The Troggs Tape". Seek it out. This version has been re-mixed rather tastefully, I thought.

Back to home page.

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars" & "The other side of the Screwdriver".

Oggy Oggy Oggy...