Green Telescope - Interview

Dave Goodwin speaks with Lenny Helsing, the lead singer, with 1980’s cult Edinburgh psychedelic act The Green Telescope on his memories of the period and the recent release on vinyl by Precious Recordings of London of their 1986 Andy Kershaw Session.

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were making a name for themselves by putting out radio sessions, did you get in touch with them? LH: Well, I had already reviewed some of the earlier Precious Recordings releases in my capacity as writer for ‘Shindig!’ magazine and also for the online platform It’s Psychedelic Baby, so I was already in contact with Nick at Precious. It was something that he had said in a messsge to me about being concerned that he might run out of groups to put out. That made me enquire if he had ever heard of a group I played in back in the 1980s called the Green Telescope who had also recorded a BBC session, not for John Peel or Janice Long, but Andy Kershaw. So, he said he would go in search of it and give it a listen and get back to me. And of course that’s what happened, and then he said he would love to put it out. PB: Where did the session take place? Was it at the BBC studio in Maida Vale in London, where the majority of these sessions happened? LH: No, our Andy Kershaw session was recorded at one of the BBC’s northern outposts, Yellow 2 studio in Stockport, near Manchester. PB: What are your memories of that session and how did you get there from Edinburgh? Was it in a minibus crammed full of guys with loads of beer? Also, recording most of the sessions took place very quickly and in a matter of hours. Is that the way you remember it? Did it pass in a blur? LH: Yeah, ha ha! Well, the three of us in the group, myself, plus bass guitarist Alan McLean and organ player Bruce Lyall, plus my brother Martin and a driver friend travelled down in a minibus the night before. We crashed overnight with friends of ours who had moved down from Edinburgh to Sheffield. After a few hours’ kip we got ourselves together and drove over to Stockport. I do remember that when we turned up to do the session the studio boffins there made fun of us, they scoffed at our battered old Sixties gear and sniggered at our clothes and hair. I mean, although we had already recorded our EP plus the odd primitive demo in a real recording studio, we were still pretty naive and I think they could sense that from us so they kind of mocked us a bit. They were maybe a little bit annoyed too that we appeared to be somewhat untogether and a little under rehearsed. Mind you we did have the gall to turn up with no drummer; our drummer was on the verge of leaving anyway and he couldn’t make it that particular weekend, and as none of our other drum-playing pals were available it was decided that I would just play the drums myself, as well as singing and playing guitar. It’s true that it all did pass by in a bit of a blur, although we were there for the majority of the day, five or six hours maybe. Actually, the memory that’s stayed with me the longest isn’t the actual session itself but rather of me finding a copy of the Rockin’ Ramrods 1966 single ‘Don’t Fool With Fu Manchu’ in a second hand, largely furniture type shop while we were walking around that part of town on our break. And it was the British release on Polydor no less, which I had no idea existed at that time. I still have this great record in my collection. PB: I was brought up in the early 80s in Nottingham and the vibe was quite eclectic back then, what was the music scene like in Edinburgh at that time? Post-punk bands like The Fire Engines and The Scars are fondly remembered, but how big was the psychedelic scene? LH: Oh, that’s pretty interesting that you should mention this. I was singing in a punk group in Edinburgh called the Belsen Horrors during 1978-79 and the first gig we played in March ‘79 was at the Art College opening for the Dirty Reds, and who would soon become the Fire Engines. Our friend Rab (Robert King) lead singer of the Scars, alongside Simon Best of the Flowers (who was also involved with the Fast Product label and groups like the Delta Five and the Mekons) came down to our practice room and recorded a demo tape for us a few months later in July. We were total Scars fans and our guitarist Steve Fraser went on to play bass for them for a while, as Scars bassist John Mackie was out of action for a few weeks. In March 1980 Scars were invited to open for Siouxsie & the Banshees for a few dates, mostly up here in Scotland, but the tour finished with two dates at the Music Machine in London. I got to tag along too as a roadie, which was great fun and was my first visit to London. To be honest, there wasn’t really a psychedelic scene as such in Edinburgh, at least not until the Green Telescope got going playing our first gigs at the start of 1982. However, saying that, some folks in our Belsen Horrors circle and the groups which me and Steve had after that, one was called November Crimes. Bass player Gary McCormack from the pre-Josek K band TV Art was in the line up and he then joined the Exploited after we split, funnily enough replacing Mark Patrizio who had been the Belsens bass player. We were already dabbling in psychedelics and we even had a group called the Day Trippers. Anyway, I digress. A year or so after the Green Telescope started gigging we heard about another local group called the Prescription, who told us they’d been really taken by the posters that we’d been designing for our gigs and leaving around at various places around town. And we became good pals with them, even though they were much more Mod-centred than ourselves. In the beginning we were definitely much more psychedelic, aligning ourselves to the far-out sounds of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, Love, Tomorrow, Pretty Things, The Byrds, Roky Erickson / 13th Floor Elevators and The Seeds, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band as well as weird folky stuff like the Incredible String Band. We were also into other stuff like Hawkwind and The Stooges, Wire, Joy Division, the Velvet Underground and the early Damned, Ants and Banshees. By 1984-85 other groups were also being created around Edinburgh like the Rubber Dolfinarium. I played drums with them and they were founded by Angus McPake, who is the long-term organist / guitar player alongside me in the Thanes, to play trashy, surfy, garage punk tunes. Our bassist Denis Boyle would also go on to be a member of the Thanes from 1988-1993. After the Rubber Dolfinarium we changed our name to the Beeville Hive V for a while into 1986 before it all fizzled out. Angus joined Jesse Garon and the Desperadoes to play bass — he had already played some bass when he stood in for Alan on the Green Telescope’s first overseas tour in August 1986 — then he switched over to drums to play in the Fizzbombs with Margarita Vasquez Ponte for a while. So, yeah a lot of the time these groups tended to include myself or other members of the group. Alan played guitar for the Stayrcase too which I subsequently joined on drums and our first drummer in the Thanes, Calvin Burt, formed a group called the Junkyard Things in 1985 where I also played drums. Junkyard Things eventually changed their name to the Offhooks and released a mini-album in the late 80s and a full-length album that was recorded in 1990 but didn’t come out for another twenty-odd years or so. Lead singer in the Stayrcase, Ian Binns, would also spent time as drummer in the Thanes from 1988-95. PB: You must have ventured further afield than Edinburgh live. I can see from one of the flyers you played a venue in Hammersmith in London. Did The Green Telescope gig a lot at that time and play far and wide? LH: Funnily enough we didn’t actually play all that much outside of Scotland. We played a gig down in Malvern (in Worcestershire) in 1983, with London punk outfit the Satellites and another in Sheffield. We did a few gigs around London in the summer of 1985, including Alice In Wonderland club in Soho, the Crypt in Deptford and the Clarendon in Hammersmith that you mentioned. Other than that we played once overseas playing in Hamburg, Amsterdam and Berlin in August 1986. By this time we had changed our name to the Thanes, however, we were still being advertised on all the posters etc as the Green Telescope. PB: The Green Telescope had been together for a few years, but eventually morphed into the Thanes. Why did you decide to change names? LH: We changed our name cos we were growing tired of all the cliched hippie and negative psychedelic connotations the name seemed to suggest to some folks. We were now actually listening to a lot more beat R&B and garage punk stuff than majoring on psychedelia, we felt it would be better for us to just have a clean break. To begin with we called ourselves The Thanes Of Cawdor (from MacBeth – English Lit Ed.) for a little while and then soon after that decided to shorten the name to just The Thanes. But of course we called the first Thanes album “Thanes Of Cawdor”. PB: Finally, the 80’s were huge and kicking live wise - did you guys get up to any shenanigans that we can legally publish? LH: Well, at the very start it was myself and organist Bruce who were inspiring each other to get things done and we originally had some totally freak-out sessions under our original name The Great Green Telescopic View Of The World. We’d start out just having these stoned impromptu sessions in our flat or sometimes in a practice room setting. Bruce would be on organ and occasionally doing vocals and I would maybe be on drums and vocals, then I began trying to learn guitar properly. Not long after we invited a guitarist friend of ours Steve Monaghan, an ex-Hells Angel who dug Syd and getting stoned to join in with us. He used to come around to our flat every Friday morning with a bong so we’d get totally wrecked before attempting some kind of rehearsal. I was starting to come up with some fairly whimsical songs at that time. After a few months Bruce and I kind of drifted away from Steve who was much more blues-based than us, and we then brought in bassist and flute player Colin Blakey. Colin played a few early gigs with us but then left to go off travelling and, much later, he ended up joining The Waterboys, playing on a few of their most famous albums. We then got Alan McLean in the group and our focus turned even more to playing teen garage punk songs from the mid-sixties, a style which then heavily seeped into material of our own that we were starting to write. Alan turned us onto albums by The Seeds, rarer Elevators stuff, the Sonics and lots of other much more obscure U.S. stuff we hadn’t heard. And in turn, originally through a friend I had at the time, I then began turning everyone I knew onto the 60s Dutch beat scene, with groups such as the Outsiders, Q65, Group 1850, the Motions, Het, Cuby + the Blizzards. We also started to find out about old Scottish 60s groups like The Poets, Boston Dexters, Beatstalkers, Athenians and Hi-Fi’s. As to publishable shenanigans? Hmm, let’s see. We were once on a Students Against Nuclear Energy (SANE) rally where we were playing on the back of a flat-bed truck experimenting with ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ as we hurtled down the Royal Mile to the bemusement of some Saturday shoppers. But there were some Mods heckling us as we proceeded along Princes Street, the centre of Edinburgh’s main thoroughfare, and they were attempting to throw water balloons at us. Another time certain Telescope members played a local gig once on acid just to see if we could and what it was like. It was a pretty freaky experience especially during that strange space in between numbers, or when the neck of the guitar tried to disguise itself as a fully breathing tiger’s back! I recall the gig we played in Amsterdam being a bit hectic and chaotic after one or two space bon-bons had been imbibed. Afterwards the Sick Rose, a great Italian garage punk combo who we were playing with, weren’t drinking and they gave us all their beer vouchers so we all got completely smashed! PB: Thank you..