Hugh Featherstone, a troubadour of our times
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LP Empty Houses 1977
 
Cover of the LP album Empty Houses by Hugh Featherstone  
Click on a track title to see lyrics and notes further down the page.

North Side

South Side

1

2

3

4

5
  Lies

Terminus

Night train

Coaster

Edge of town
6

7

8

9

10
  The inside war

Lights

Silver flute

Union Dan

Cosmic Dan
All songs by Hugh Featherstone
 
 
Text in this rather fetching blue-green is by Hugh.


Recorded in London and Epsom between 1973 and 1975.

For my brother Philip who pushed on ahead of us all ...

Several of the tracks on this, my first album, were recorded at home on a two track Nagra through one of the earliest Kelsey/Morris mixers my brother Graham designed before he founded Soundcraft. Others were recorded at Central Sound, London, as a demo financed by the American company Kinney Records, while the remaining four tracks were made by Island Records at their Hammersmith studio.

At that time I was due to sign a contract with Island, who had just made a mint of money with the legendary Greek songwriter Cat Stevens and the equally legendary Bob Marley. What I was not told at the time was that the deal was conditional on Paul Samwell-Smith, Cat Stevens' producer, agreeing to produce me. The tapes were duly sent to Samwell-Smith in New York. He phoned back to say that he only wanted to produce "real" rockbands in the future, he was tired of producing solo artists.

The next day I arrived in Hammersmith to be told that the deal was off. This was embarrasing for the people at Island, who were pretty sure they wanted me, but it was even more embarrassing to me, as I had told all my friends I had a record deal with a major label!

As far as I know, Paul Samwell-Smith never produced another major artist. However, his work with Cat Stevens, particularly the utterly brilliant Catch Bull at Four, is surely a sufficient monument for anyone.

Arriving in Darmstadt, Germany, a few years later, I played a gig in the local folk club and quickly became flavour of the month there. It was during this time at the Krone that I was introduced to Michael Stühr, writer and editor of radical literature. He liked my music and suggested we make a record. I told him I already had the tapes and so Empty Houses was quickly finished.

I used my own sleeve design featuring a super-romantic photo from Don Stevenson. I am sure that I have never really looked that good. If politics is the art of the possible, photography is the art of the improbable.

Listening to it now - the choirboy voice, the slightly pretentious lyrics - I'm surprised I even got past the door at Island. It seems I matured late. Yet some of the songs, such as Coaster, Night Train, Silver Flute, Edge of Town or Lights are still very solid and worth revisiting.

Credit might be due to:
Paul, for his acoustic picking
Henry, for all the keyboard work
Simon, for learning the bass
Richard, for hitting things with sticks
Jon, for the alto sax
Graham, Phil at Island
and Big roger, for mixing and keeping it reasonably cool
Kurt, for the master tape
Sanchi and all at No. 76 for being there
Don and Rosi for photos and patience
Gisela for the ms decal
and ms himself for the black sleeve and the backing.


Published by ms edition, Darmstadt, Germany
ms 003



Are you sitting comfortably?

Choirboy voice and 70s sensibilities aside, Empty Houses is a startling debut album, with its contrasting dreamsongs and biting social satire. With hindsight (now available at an optometrist near you), at the time this places Hugh in a songwriting vanguard, right on the cusp of the end of hippy aquarianism, which was receding as fast as some of its acolytes' hairlines, and the advent of a much harsher approach which was to come to the fore with the arrival of punk and new wave music. That this transition was nothing new - merely a recycling of the kind of cultural renaissance that had brought us the acid wit of Bob Dylan and his generation in the 1960s - was not lost on Hugh, and he explored it in his album Announcer (e.g carry on the song).

For his growing number of admirers, especially throughout Britain which he had finally forsaken in late 1975 when he moved to Germany, this first record was a treasure. Uptil then, his live performances were the only way to get a fix of his music, although a couple of extremely lo-fi cassette copies of his gigs (yes, there are Featherstone bootlegs out there, see the discography page) were passsing among friends.

Hugh played me the Island tapes during a visit to his parents' home in Epsom. We arrived from Wales very late in the evening, so he sat me an armchair, fitted me with some expensive headphones plugged into an even more expensive reel-to-reel tape machine. "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin..." he may or may not have said - difficult to say with the phones wrapped around my lugholes - then he turned the tape on ...

... Now, I was young and unexperienced, and had never before listened to music from such a high quality source. So I was atonished at what I heard. I swear, I could hear finger tips sliding up and down strings and caressing piano keys. A richly sensous experience. I was especially beguiled by the driving, yearning guitar rhythm of Lights. What a blast! That kind kind of thrill you just can't buy.

Lights became my favourite, and it was a morale booster to hum it while hitchhiking through Europe, e.g. waiting for a lift on a rainy Sunday evening on the Yugoslavian border. Well, it would be, wouldn't it?

David John, September 2003
Empty Houses front cover photo of Hugh Featherstone

Close-up of Don Stevenson's
photo of Hugh on the front cover
 
Empty Houses cover calligraphy by Hugh Featherstone

Album title on the front cover.
Joined-up writing by Hugh.
 
Empty Houses back cover photo of Hugh Featherstone

Back cover photo
by Don Stevenson
 
Front cover of the album Empty Houses by Hugh Featherstone Blyth

Empty Houses front cover
 
Back cover of the album Empty Houses by Hugh Featherstone Blyth

Empty Houses back cover
 
Empty Houses lyrics and notes  
Text in this rather fetching blue-green is by Hugh.
 
Empty Houses Lights track 7
 

Also known as Lights along the highway.

Hugh also recorded his song with the German band LoKal Heroes
for their CD To be continued ..., released in 2012.

In 2013 he wrote:

I wrote this song back in the early 1970s when I thought I was going to be a rock star (yeah!), hence the phrase "people all down the line would trade their lives for mine"... I'm no longer entirely convinced of that. The song is about aimlessness and freedom and the roads we all travelled to nowhere in particular, back when we were young and rootless.

Lights is still one of my personal favourites, as well as being a song that gets covered: "LoKal Heroes" chose it for their latest CD (It's always gratifying to read someone else's name, rather than mine on the GEMA account), which means that it's part of a regular programme once again, after all these years.

Each time I come to the lines "the old house by the bridge, cattle on the ridge", I get a bit choked up because it reminds me of our cottage in Wales on the Grwyne Fawr river, and I realize that my childhood has become another country, very far away and very long ago.


 
Empty Houses lyrics and notes  
Text in this rather fetching blue-green is by Hugh.
 
Empty Houses Night train track 3

I can hear that night train running by your window
Carrying my sorrows down
To the sidings at the bottom of the town
And though it looks as if I'm leaving you
I'm at a junction, I don't know
Where I'm going, going to go

Wish I could lay me down and sleep
Wish I could lay me down and sleep
Wish I could lay me down and sleep

All my life I've been dreaming of arrivals
So I never thought it could come to this ... departure
In the shadow of a kiss
And what we might have been together
Now we know we never shall become
The parting is smaller than the sum

Wish I could lay me down and sleep
Wish I could lay me down and sleep
Wish I could lay me down and sleep
Wish I could lay me down and sleep
Wish I could lay me down and sleep

Maybe to dream of tomorrow
Dream of tomorrow, tomorrow
Sunshine and sorrow
 
Empty Houses Cosmic Dan track 10

Hagen hooks up into automatic drive, factor 54790
Switches on a blue film, lights up a pipe, takes a toke and lets himself go
He's a long-range trucker from Venus
with a cargo for a steel works out on the moon
What he doesn't know is that he's got a drifter stowed away in the reactor room
But it's a long way from Venus, long way from Station 42
And I'm on a freighter flight through the endless twilight
Earthbound back to you

Two-hundred-fifty-thousand tons of ore is worth going half a light-year for
Hagen has a contract that'll make him rich
he's had a taste already, it's given him the itch
Back home he's known as Cosmic Dan, the super-heavy cargo man
A powerful guy, well over six-foot tall, while I'm just a lover, no one special at all
And it's a long way from Venus, long way from station 42
And I'm on a freighter flight through the endless twilight
Drifting back to you

Hagen is ambitious, wants to be respected, get his kids to higher grade school
His house is like a showroom with a nuclear zoom and a five-dimensional pool
Folks on his street always nod and say "hi!"
but out here, he's just another speck in the sky
Me I might make it as a ZootRock star
but I gotta time it right, you know how things are
And it's a long way from Venus, long way from Station 42
And I'm on a freighter flight, through the endless twilight
Earthbound back to you

Girl, you just don't know how lonely it is to be banished for seven years
The nights I've lain in the cosmic rain, just a-choking back the tears
Nobody cared to see justice done; put me on a transport bound for some other sun
It don't look like much, that little blue Earth,
But my baby lives there and it's the place of my birth
I pressed some flowers for you on Saduron and I brought you a ring on Sapphire 3
Now I'm on a freighter flight, through the endless twilight
And I hope you’re waiting for me!

Yes, I'm on a freighter flight, through the endless twilight
And I hope you're waiting for me!

It's been a long way from Venus, long way from Station 42
And I'm on a freighter flight through the endless twilight
Drifting, drifting back to you
Earthbound back to you
Drifting back to you!
 
Hugh Featherstone plays Kraushaar Guitars
 
www.featherstone.de website design Ursa Major