The Ten Ton Trucks

It all happened on dorset street…

One thing I can most definitely be accused of is spending far too much time dreaming up completely fictional backstories for the myriad of fake bands that relentlessly present themselves to me. But here we have a band that is at least only semi-fictional at best, having appeared in the wild on one well-documented occasion.

The Ten Ton Trucks were a band designed to be ‘cringey folk rock troubadours with delusions of grandeur and ideas well above their paygrade’ for the Morrissey biopic ‘England Is Mine’. I was only tasked with writing a few ‘terrible throwaway numbers’, then bringing a nameless band together, recording the snippets for playback and appearing in the first scene of the film, to be derided by a teenage Steven Morrissey as he jots down a few negative notes about this truly awful band. More details about my involvement in the film are here if you’re that way inclined.

I couldn’t help but flesh out the mythology of this ‘lost Mancunian group’ after we had an impromptu photoshoot outside the filming location on Dorset Street in Stretford (young Morrissey’s stomping ground) in our 70’s wigs and outfits (which you can see above).

A full potted history of this tragic, tragic band follows…

*Editor’s note; To coincide with the release of ‘Aural History - the unreleased album and demos of the Ten Ton Trucks’, music journalist Tebby Dimples was asked to conjure up some enlightening liner notes. Little did we know he would uncover such a rich tapestry of history, music, friendship, war and wool manufacturing. Article follows;

‘Aural History’ - a retrospective inspection of the life and music of the Ten Ton Trucks.

by Tebby Dimples, 2016

It was the heady, smoggy, greystone red-brick, factory-chimney-stack days of early 1970’s Manchester. The utopian idealism of the late 60’s was dead and buried, but the dream lived on in the hearts of artists, poets and above all musicians. Vinyl still reigned supreme as king (8-track notwithstanding), and those who chose to commit their art into those authentic machine-pressed trenches stole themselves a chance to live on indefinitely, preserved within the plastic grooves of a now bygone era. Was it really 44 years ago? The answer is, of course, yes. But only if you’re counting. And who has time for counting when you’re at the forefront of yesterday’s history?

The Ten Ton Trucks were formed, by accident, in Dearwent, North Lancashire, in that beguiling and utterly unrememberable pre-decimal summer of 1970. Anton Glove, singer and principal songwriter of the band, was looking for a supplementary income to bolster his meagre wages working at the local wool-purifying plant. When a chance glance at an otherwise innocuous advert for entrants to a local talent competition - first prize 3 pounds 7 shillings and 2 pence (around £38 in new money, adjusted for inflation and index linked to the fluctuating wool markets at the time of writing, February 2017). He put word out around the plant that he was looking for “anyone at all, regardless of talent or skill” to form a group around his own inconsiderable talents. “I thought we had a fair crack at getting at least 2nd place - the weekend break to Skegness - so I asked around and managed to cobble together a set of chancers that I reckoned could do my songs justice”.

And justice to those songs did they do.

First to respond to Anton’s broadcast was fledgling guitarist Derys A. Lighte, a coal miner’s uncle from Blakeley-in-th’-Croft. Having studied the guitar under Eric Clapton - he’d stayed in the flat beneath him in Blakeley for one summer and found a “beaten up old Spanish number” in the boiler cupboard holding up the drying rack. “I mean it were a right piece of garbage. All I got that summer were loud knocks from the ceiling - ‘Shut that bloody racket up!’ and the like. Aye, a grand 3 months that were”, he notes wistfully. Acknowledging that Glove’s compositions “weren’t terrible”, he gladly joined the ranks and hoped upon hope for success in the competition.

Erstwhile bassist Charmaine Manne and his colleague and workmate, rapaciously thunderous drummer Howie Sounes-Knowe followed in short shrift, recruited from the warehouse floor of a department store in the well-to-do former market town of Wethernay, Grintle. “Well, we were just looking for owt to do really” Manne recalls. “So much were ‘appenin in the larger cities, we both thought ‘I’ll ave a bit a’ that’!”

“I mean, shifting boxes and furniture’s all well and good, but all the ‘talent’ were congregatin’ in the, shall we say, less rural parts of the world at that time.”

They saw Glove’s invitation as a gateway into that entrancing and sexually intriguing world of the Working Men’s Clubs of the Greater Manchester area. “We bit ‘is bloody ‘and off!” Manne remarks. Sounes-Knowe adds thoughtfully “Aye - songs weren’t shite as far as I could tell so we said “Yer on!”.”

Intensive rehearsal sessions ensued at Glove’s two-up two-down terraced home in upside downtown Dearwent. They were cut short 1 hour in when the police turned up banging on the spare room door, demanding the noise be ‘turned down entirely or cut off completely’ due to a complaint lodged by Minky, Glove’s wife at the time. “Well that really put a spanner in the wool-thresher for us - we were an outfit without an outlet” Glove remembers unsettlingly.

Luckily, the local Scout Hut had lain abandoned since the scoutmaster had moved to Spain in great haste a few months prior to the band forming. “We asked his missus if we could borrow his keys, and she just said “You can ‘ave ‘em”. Soon enough we were back in business, bashing away at the songs and bringing it all together for the talent competition. We had two weeks, more than enough time.”

Somehow, as luck would have it, and in a fashion no-one could have predicted, these unlikely lads found themselves gelling - musically and emotionally - and a musical force not seen since the likes of The Clumsy Nutters began emerging in that damp and forgotten pre-fab building just behind the Woolworths on Fanny’s Lane.

“Well, the day of the talent competition came around and we were gunning for it. I mean, really hyped, you know”. On arrival at the Derwent Working Men’s Club, the band were told that “no other acts had registered apart from Curious Colin the Conjurer from Caffton, and he’s slipped a disc bringing his magic chest into the backstage so it’s only you on tonight”. Perhaps high from the win, or maybe in combination with the unregulated home-brewed ale on offer that night, Anton Glove declared that he had decided they were going to take their well-earned winnings and propel the band to the next level. “Minky can go and chuff herself - she’s never supported me and me music, so she can shove it”.

Recording sessions were booked in June of 1967 at the Stockport Steel Mill and Iron Refinery, which moonlighted as a studio with an unusually metallic live room. This had been the magic ingredient in many smash hits of the mid 60’s, from Sunny Brambles’ evergreen classic “She Were A Steelman’s Daughter” to the psyche-out sounds of Johnny Zoom and the Timpani Six’s “Chocolate Alarm Clock” (which sadly pre-dated the psychedelic period by 4 years and failed to chart anywhere except Denmark where it went triple platinum).

The band focused ever more on refining their sound, striking upon the balance of old folk and new rock they are so rightly now admonished for. They attempted to combine the timeless ramblings of English country folk music with the far-out electric wails and warbles of the modern (for the time) pop/rock scene. Some say it was a clash too far for the listening public of the era, but time has shown that these naysayers were, and are, at least only half-right in their dismissal of Dearwent’s finest. In all, 124 songs were prepared for the 2 day sessions. Unable (or unwilling) to separate the wheat from the chaff, Glove insisted all 124 were attempted during the continuous 48 hour recording marathon. Many were performed only halfway through with the instruction to “Just dub it twice on the tape to bring it up to full length”. Ambitious, electric, gluttonous, insatiable, disastrous - the catering on offer was a mixed bag, but the band were able to work right through from 6am on June 18th to 6am on the 20th with no breaks whatsoever. Engineer Jim Jimson recalls “I just left the tape running and told them to please themselves. I wasn’t going to work flat out with no tea breaks, unionised or not. I mean, for christ sakes they'd already been recording for over half an hour at that point”.

After a three week period of recuperation, Glove inspected the tapes, hoping to glimpse the genius he was so sure would be evident in such a large collection of works. Unfortunately, having left the 8 reels next to the magnetic wool purifier which took up most of the room at the wool-plant he had been secretly sleeping in for the past fortnight, he found them entirely blank. “To say I was devastated would be an understatement. I was really devastated”.

From his profits of the sale of the Glove home in Dearwent - they had both decided to go their separate ways at Minky’s insistence - Anton reassembled the band with a new plan. This would be the planting of the first seeds of the Dorset Street double album project. All they needed, Anton explained, “was the right amount of water, sunlight, nitrogen and encouragement, and something extraordinary was bound to sprout and take wing”.

Having burned bridges with Jim Jimson at Steelmill Studios - Charmaine had “…told him [he] thought his braces were inappropriate with all the expensive equipment around” - they sought new premises to capture the sound of the Ten Ton Trucks. Having overheard a conversation between two drunken steelwinders at Manker’s Hop Shop in New Barnsworth debating where the ‘best acoustic space in the Northwest’ could be found, Lighte alerted Glove to the existence of the basement of the Boy’s Brigade Building on Dorset Street in blossoming Stretford, Manchester. A plan was hastily hatched - Glove’s alternative sleeping arrangements had been rumbled by the night watchman and he was desperate to find a new place to hide his valuables. He was also keen to get the album off the ground and shop it around the London labels.

With a much tighter schedule (the Boys Bridage met every night from 7 until 8:30, quashing any plans of a ‘continuous outpouring’ like the last attempt) the lads hired a 12-track mobile recording setup and got to work, focusing on just 28 songs this time around. They slap-dashedly recruited Barry Shingles, the Boy’s Brigade cloakroom attendant at the time, to work the tape machine, inadvertently kickstarting a career that would take him to the glittering studios of late 70’s Los Angeles and his eventual death by misadventure, nostrils full of cocaine and hanging by his own studded leather belt from the door of a toilet cubicle in Tony Master’s Baboon Lounge and European Pool Experience, just off the Sunset Strip. Such were the highs and lows of the glamorous 70’s music scene.

Careful to avoid any large magnetic fields, having learned his lesson so sorely last time, Anton took the tapes straight to Percy Prosser’s Pressing Plant in Prestwich, North Lancs. Percy and Anton had a chequered history, and now that Percy had shacked up with Minky, Anton felt that he “…really owed me one”. A short run of 15 test pressings were made, with placeholder artwork supplied by late 60’s Manchester performance artist Cszhegg (who at the time was in a particular creative slump - by all accounts Dorset Street had, in retrospect, the least innovative design of any record pressed in the late 60s/early 70’s. In fact it often tops the lists of ‘worst album covers’ rundowns in Mojo, Word and other relevant music magazines).

Despite the odds, Art Fanning - owner of the freshly opened Bananana Records - jumped at the chance to license in perpetuity the recordings of the most comfortably dressed band he had seen in the last 5 years. Unfamiliar with such legal terms, Glove signed the record over without a second thought. “I gave them the remaining 14 records, thinking ‘well I won’t be bloody needing these!’ and thought - ‘Job done, Anty - you’ve really gone and made it good now my old son!’ “ This oversight would be his downfall, and could be seen as the beginning of the end that came before they had even left the gate.

Excited by the prospect of ‘making it’ - Glove had an immense outpouring of creativity. He completed, in his estimation, over 412 songs (as well as two long form plays and a film treatment) in the following 2 weeks - a not inconsiderable feat considering the damp, musty and unforgiving conditions of the Boy’s Brigade Basement where he was ensconced. So too were the others inspired and excited. Between Lighte, Sounes-Knowe and Manne, they amassed an auxiliary catalogue of over 34 songs, all of which were roundly rejected by Glove - “They just didn’t fit the vision of the band”. Even an album cover was mocked up for what was surely going to be their smash sophomore effort, Avocado.

But then disaster struck - 2 months later the album was shelved indefinitely. “Folk music is on the way out lads” Fanning had declared - and their music would languish in obscurity for the next 43 years and 3 months.

Despondent, the lads called it quits, deciding to follow their own individual, and unsuccessful musical paths in the devastating wake of such a near-miss.

2016, and with the advent of the internet, and the proliferation of thousands of bootlegs of long-lost hidden gems, tossed around like cheap pamphlets in a GP’s waiting room, it was inevitable that the music of the Ten Ton Trucks would eventually have the spotlight shone onto it. Finally, it would be squandered talent no more.

And so, here we are - revelling in the delights of the unearthed Dorset Street recordings after the death of Art Fanning and subsequent relinquishing of all his contractually imprisoned material. Two simultaneous releases, the 28 track Dorset Street standard edition (as it would have been released), and the much larger 300+ song retrospective ‘Aural History’ collection which also covers the member’s abortive solo careers adjacent to the demise of the triple T’s.

From our privileged vantage, we can only imagine what kind of album Avocado would have been, and if it would have propelled them to the heights they so assuredly believed they deserved. Perhaps behind the hum and hiss of Glove’s stripped-back home recordings, nestled within Lighte’s epic 12 minute guitar ‘sound-paintings’, between the spaces of Sounes-Knowe’s one-man percussion jams and blatantly exposed through Manne’s 30-second funk ejaculations, there exists a feeling that so much more was in store for these simple blokes from the North of England. If only… if only.