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The Hefner Heart (AFF05) 5 Song CD EP released on Spanish label Acuarela Released on 22nd February 1999 Mary Lee, The Hymn for the Things We Didn't Do, Karen, The Heart of Portland Oregon,The Hymn for Thomas Courtney Warner |
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Mary Lee
Mother is fucked up, Father is fucked up,
The Hymn for all the Things We Didn't Do
The Hymn for Thomas Courtney Warner
All this land was privately owned in the late 1800's when Thomas Courtney Warner decided to build cheap accommodation for the working classes,
Karen
Sitting side by side with a lunch box on her thighs,
The Heart of Portland, Oregon
The Hymn for Thomas Courtney Warner
All this land was privately owned in the late 1800's when Thomas Courtney Warner decided to build cheap accommodation for the working classes,
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Other Information
If you were to just look at the credits on the back of It wasn't an instant decision for Jack to join the band. The thing that immediately struck us about Jack was how different to us he was musically. Where as with us everything was minimal, tight and hardly ever improvised, Jack was much more of a 'feel' musician. Sometimes it didn't work, Jack could play about 5 instruments or so but if you gave him a pre-determined part of about five notes it took him forever to get his head around it. If however you described what you were after in adjectives, for example, ask him to play more spiky , or soft, or just let him be himself the parts he came up with would be fantastic. I often got the impression with Jack that he was playing to the lyrics rather then following what the music was doing which was great. Mary Lee contains the stupidest lyric I ever wrote in my life. The lyric goes. 'This girl has trestles, hanging to her ankles'. Of course what I meant was tresses, as in locks of hair, trestles are long tables. So in the song she has long tables hanging from her head, what an idiot! The Hymn for the Things We Didn't Do ! The best of the Hymn songs? Maybe. About breaking up with someone special. Jack plays harmonica on this. Always fun to sing live with Antony. Karen is one of the last 4 track songs from the loft to The Heart of Portland Oregon, once again is a true and specific tale of me in Portland a few years earlier. I think its just me on this. Both this and the above were recorded at home at Edward Road. All the photos on this page are copyright the Black Sessions. A radio show in France. Jack's Stories These stories originally appeared on Hefnet around the time of Fidelity Wars. All stories are copyright Jack Hayter A Squelchy Snap This woman my wife knows took her holiday snaps to Boots to be developed. Oh...a cottage she and her husband shared with another couple, I believe. They take holidays like that because its easier with the kids. Lyme Regis, or near there, maybe Bridport. Anyway she gets the pictures back from Boots takes them home after a serious afternoon's shopping and sits down with a cuppa to look at them. Lovely. She gets about halfway through the second lot and there's two pictures stuck together. Prises them apart with Rimmel nails and finds a rather greasy looking, obviously used Fetherlite lying right across her daughters face. ...about four an a half ,maybe five. Still at nursery. Of course she goes straight back to Boots, raging and spitting fire. Goes to the photo counter (its one of the bigger stores - Bromley Glades I'm sure ) and kicks seven shades out of the staff until she gets the supervisor. He comes out from behind one of those big developing machines they have. A big sweaty man in a white coat, and she's only just over five foot...pretty mind you. She starts really mouthing off..."disgusting...who...all over my little girls face...how the fuck does this sort of thing ..." and so on. Then she pulls out one of those little bank coin bags from her coat pocket and inside it there's a rolled up kitchen towel and gives it to the man. Well, he unwraps it all and there's the photograph with the frenchy all stuck to it and the juices from it have sort of dissolved the colours in the picture so the whole thing looks like one evil bloody mess. Then the supervisor bends over, winks at her and pulls the johnny off the picture with his teeth, which makes a squelchy snappy noise, and says "Madam this is a prophylactic...", and holds up his left hand. He is wearing a pink rubber glove on that hand, and on each of the fingers there is a removable silicone rubber protective. "...used to prevent fingerprints on wet photographic emulsion.." he adds with a leery smirk as my wife's friend heads out the exit. Copyright Jack Hayter 1999
Fillet-o-Fish Many people are unaware that some of the best fossil hunting places in England are near the centre of London. Moreover,these sites are often on high ground; the pebble beds of the Thames having been heaved upwards during the last couple of million years. Last weekend I was walking in the woods at the back of Lesness Abbey near Thamesmead and,as I neared the top of the hill, wading through the broken glass and fast food cartons, I saw a rabbit warren to my right. The ground in front of the burrows was littered with fragments of seashell which the bunnies had extracted fron the sandy soil and, as they kicked the soil out of their holes, gravity had sifted it. I picked up a handful of this debris and found a fine fossilised shark tooth. Over the next twenty minutes I found about a dozen more; the largest being over an inch in length, and still extremely sharp. It is a curious feeling when one finds a sixty million year old sharks tooth lying next to a MacDonalds wrapper. Did the owner of the tooth come to regret its fondness for crap comestibles ? Copyright Jack Hayter 1999
Flesh and Bone in Hardware (Write about what you know, they said....and here's a thing for Bobby and Sandra but mostly for young Soss who could surf a Jungenreich pallet truck like a skateboard and damn nearly cut my legs off while doing so.) There were still pallets left at a quarter to four. The whole deal like some monument to everlasting crap.The labours of Sysiphus. No end in sight. Just as he thought he'd finished , turn another corner between the aisles and Fuck, another one to be sorted , stacked and faced up. John Dunnet had just started in Paintbrushes and Rollers, musak drifting around the empty store, endless Eighties shit. He had no choice of program. The satellite link handled the in store acoustic ambience; You could adjust the volume within certain limits but that was it. The link couldn't be turned off, even at night. The kit was in the manager's locked office and, besides, the nightly download of sales and stock figures would fail to materialise if he'd switched it off. So there he was, flesh and bone in Hardware and not yet close enough to dawn. On and on... one and a half inch Harris brush ,used to be a cinema, check the bar-code, rolling pallets in the aisles now, slide it onto the hangers, snogging lovers in the back row by the floor tiles, next, two- two- five mil sim' sheepskin roller refills...after a couple of months you got pretty fast. But it was a big DIY store, Faye Wray and Fatty A once filled its void, but now a big heartless ,don't fuck with me sort of a giant paint shop and he was a slight smallbones with barely enough meat to stack the cans of trade emulsion and heave overstock pots of filler into the space above the racks. You could never finish the job. Central Delivery Remainders to be dealt with by the day staff. They never did. There is that time of the night ; all solo shift workers know it when the eyes and ears start to play games. Something to do with the effects of fatigue and loneliness on the periphery of our senses makes us hear our own name being spoken by no-one, or causes us to see see small or distant objects off to the side creeping crabwise nearer to the centre of our vision. Soldiers on point duty and shelf stackers have more in common than they might realise.... .... a short story to be continued when next I'm in West Norwood. Remember what you said, Soss, a shite job beats a dead end one hands down....pretty good for a kid. That B & Q is haunted by a 1924 suicide. She cut her wrists at the start of the matinee and stayed to the end of the last showing. We never found out what film. We won't go back. We won't go back. Never go back. Copyright Jack Hayter 1999 |
Simon Aldous, who helped me put out the first few records, had a band called Umbrella Heaven who my girlfriend, Jen, played keyboards for. One night they played a gig in New Cross in a place called the Paradise Bar (it wasn't paradise). Before, or after, Umbrella Heaven was this band called Spongefinger. They had a pretty weird line up, including saw and pedal steel, and a drummer who had his parts notated, though none of that interested me as much as the fact that the band were laughing a lot on stage. The only other band I knew that laughed a lot on stage was Hefner. The pedal steel player seemed to be having the most fun. His name was Jack Hayter and of course was set to become the fourth member of Hefner.
the albums, you might think that Jack joined the band on Boxing Hefner or maybe We Love the City, but Jacks first ever gig with us was at the Acoustic Cafe, just after we released Breaking God's Heart. For a while after he joined us at various gigs usually adding steel parts for a few songs from the BGH sessions. He played at most of the London shows, and came with us to Paris to play at the 'Black' radio sessions (pictured here) and also to support Belle and Sebastian.
The first time Jack joined us in the studio was in Cafe Eric for one of our last recording sessions there (though we continued to rehearse there until the end). We recorded The Hymn for the Things We Didn't Do, and Hymn for the Alcohol with him. He played harmonica on 'things' and steel on 'Alcohol'. We also recorded 'Mary Lee' on that day but I don't recall Jack doing anything on that.
be released. Home recording continued at my new place in Edward road, but never with quite the same frequency, it was more for demos. Its just me and Antony on this, it took hours to do the ending as we couldn't stop laughing. Part of the vocal is done through the flats intercom. Karen was a girl who worked at the blood bank , she's the same girl that appears in Hello Kitten I don't think she ever found out that she had two songs written about her though her brother interviewed me once so maybe. The keyboard is the classic Casio PT30 a must for any home recordist £3 from any boot fair.
Thomas Warner designed the flat I moved into after the loft and the flat I live in now. The lyrics explain the rest. These songs are so weird , so specific to me and me only, maybe that's why I put them on an obscure Spanish release. It is perhaps interesting to note how early on we were using keyboards and electronic instruments, I always felt there were lots of clues before Dead Media that we may go that way.