Nutmeg

Nutmeg were and still am the favourites of my Onion Records signings. Read their story and listen below to the few surviving recordings of their magical folk-and-then-some music. Harry Onion (Onion Records)

Click on the LP covers below to hear the album on the Free Music Archive

Below is the only surviving film footage of Nutmeg's Benji Wendle and Clive Masters playing together; a live version of "(There's a) Bee (in my Bonnet), Hello!", the aptly titled B side to their 1977 Eurovision song contest entry (There's a) Wasp in (My Welly)

(There's a) Wasp in (My Welly)
Nutmeg's Eurovision Song Contest entry 1977
Click here to hear the song on the Free Music Archive
The competition was held on May 7th in London, and hosted by Angela Rippon. French entrant Marie Myriam narrowly beat Nutmeg to win with her dirge "The Bird And The Child". Nutmeg were gallant losers, their "(There's a) Wasp in (My Welly)" coming in a respectable second.

The song was later released as a single with the appropriately titled B-side "(There's a) Bee (in my Bonnet), Hello!"

"As every sock needs a shoe and every man needs something to do, Nutmeg needed a B-side for their unexpected hit (There's a) Wasp in (My Welly). 

Cue exhaustion. Cue a mead binge. 

Cue a night sat up all of and a classic B-side written. 

Benji Wendle provided the lovelorn verses and Clive Masters chipped in with the transcendent harmonies on the chorus. Job done. Benji also played a kazoo to within an inch of it's life... Result? This."
Anon

Official Biography by Quietly Spoken Bob Harris

The day of February 4th 1977 started much as any other. I was staying in Cambridge, England at the time, doing research into a paper I was writing on funny pop songs. I stumbled into the kitchen and exchanged mumbled greetings with Ted and Angus, my hosts. They were poring over the local papers and seemed excitable. As I fixed my breakfast I asked them what was up.

I remember it was a Tuesday.

'There’s a band playing the Corn Exchange tonight,' said Angus.

‘I’ve heard good things about them’ said Ted. My ears pricked up and I asked for more details as my toast popped up. Angus responded:

‘They’re called Nutmeg. And they play folk music, but…”

He paused. I raised an eyebrow.

“But differently” he continued.

I took the paper and read it. “Yes please”, I thought.

We all agreed to meet up for the gig that evening. As it turned out, neither of them attended. Ted was arrested that day for selling drugs, and Angus was busy.

Mark the date, dear reader. Mark the date because 04/02/77 was the day my young life was blown apart.

At the Corn Exchange that evening the magic started slowly. A solitary candle flickered on a table-top atop the top of the lonely stage. At the back, the drums and sitars; waiting, and at the front, teetering over the front rows of the audience, were two microphoned stands and a couple of futuristic looking pianos. You could actually smell the excitement in the room, and it smelled a bit like a mixture of sweat, beer and the future of folk.

A beautiful young man of mysterious colour and origin strode onto the stage and positioned himself behind the drums and sitars. A pause, then another handsome young buck appeared, in a cheesecloth shirt and denim shorts. This man I’d seen about town. Benji Wendle. A real looker, and now here he was, wielding an electric guitar, like a tuneful chainsaw.

“Ladies and Gentlemen!” he cried. “WE ARE NUTMEG!”

The lights went out, leaving the flickering candle as the only source of illumination, until, that is, the music began and the real “illumination” happened. Clive and Wendy Masters had crept onto the stage in secret. It was too dark to see them properly. The brother and sister had arrived, joining the mysterious man (Mahatma Coat was his name, according to various whispers flying around the room) and Benji Wendle on stage at the Corn Exchange that night and immediately there was magic in the air.

‘Pon My Mossy Grove’ was the first number, as I recall. It remains, to this day, the single most mind-altering performance I have ever seen in my career as a pop-expert expert.

Nutmeg changed my life that night but, as one does, I began asking myself questions; Who are they? Where are they from? Why are they doing this? What was that thing? I didn’t have the answers to the questions I was asking myself so I decided to do a little old-fashioned research in order to find the answers I was looking for to the questions I was asking myself.

The Nutmeg story really starts on June 2nd 1956 when Julia Masters gave birth to her first and only boy-child, Clifton Horatio Sunshine Masters. Clifton was a solitary boy, bullied by fellow toddlers form the get go. He realised, aged six, that most of the humiliation was to do with his name. He decided to be known as Clive, instead of Clifton, but the bullying continued. Clive only ever seemed happy when sat, soggy-kneed, in the sandpit his father Tom had dug out in their back garden. He’d sit there, cross-legged, tooting away on his precious tin whistle and chatting to his “imaginary” fairy friends. Some rock-historians have hypothesised that ‘Whistles and Bells (And More Whistles)’ may have been inspired by this experience, but they couldn't be sure.

Wendy Brenda Masters was born on May 1st 1960. She was doted on by her parents, who possibly saw her as less irritating than Clifton, but also thought she was probably not as bright.

Parents Tom (a vivisectionist) and Julia (an oboe teaching teacher) loved their precociously lonely son and their funny, friendly but slightly dim daughter with all of both of their hearts. In 1963 they sent Clive off to boarding school, where he achieved good marks – both on his academic record and his backside. Eton College followed, as did A grades in philosophy, history and cross-stitch running.

Wendy did very well during her stint at Roedean and gained high marks in both English Hat Studies and Music as a Second Language. Wendy was also a big bully, and once (if legend is to be believed) made a visiting clergyman vomit his guts up by punching him in his tummy.

It was 1974 when Clive started at Trinity College, Cambridge.

In his Medievalism degree he excelled, especially in the field of fields which had big, old walls. In his third year, on a crisp April morning (we don't know the exact date), Clive met a new arrival to the University in the library. The fresh-faced fresher he violently ran into was Benji Wendle, a newly arrived undergraduate in Semi-Semiotics. The two young men picked themselves up and dusted themselves down. A quick nod of manly acceptance later and they went in their respective directions;

It was literally quieter than a library in that library in the moments that followed. You could have heard the sound a pin or something else small might have made if somebody had dropped it on the floor.

Until, that is, Benji started whistling.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says now “but I do know what I was whistling. It was Greensleeves by Henry VIII.” A classic historical folk melody, and a classic moment in folk melody history. Benji was whistling this old school tune as he walked through this old school room, away from Clive. Benji claims he heard a noise; “I heard a noise” he revealed to me in a later interview, and turned around. "The guy I had bumped into was staring at me. He raised his eyebrows, and that was that”.

The two young men went their separate ways; Clive went towards the refectory to eat his usual frugal breakfast of an egg with salt, and Benji headed to the porters’ lodge where a wellington boot he’d lost the previous evening had been handed in. The connection had been made though, and before long, these fellows became firm friends.

They started frequenting the Thursday night “Hey Nonny Yes” evenings at the Black Dragon pub on Queen Street. These nights saw Clive and Benji become even firmer friends. To one of these evenings, Clive invited his younger sister Wendy. He’d asked her up to Cambridge, if truth be told, to help with some ongoing haberdashery issues he was experiencing. It was a night, however, that saw greater things sown together than moleskin trousers.

They bought their obligatory pints of cider and sat at a table near the stage. Everyone there that night has agreed on one thing: the fact that the first two acts were very poor indeed. ‘Creeping Peter’ and ‘Two Johns and a David’ as much failed to make their mark on the audience that night as they have on the world at large since.

Then a young oriental gentleman shimmered onto the stage, full of Eastern Promise – much like Fry’s Turkish Delight. This was Mahatma Coat.

“He was playing traditional English folk tunes, but using a sitar. He blew us away” Benji recalls. “Here was some weird dude from Egypt, or somewhere, who really understood the passion behind the songs. He nailed Wiggy Saturday’s ‘Where’s My Horse?’ then proceeded to do the best version, to this very day, I’ve ever heard of ‘Tingle my Tangle’ by Noddy and the Handshakes. He simply knocked us out.”

Masters was equally taken with the mysterious Coat’s performance. He approached him after the show, in the toilets. Legend has it that, at this meeting, Masters asked Coat to join the fledgling band he was planning with Benji. Nobody knows exactly what happened next; what was spoken by these two young talents, but it was probably just a “yes” from Coat, as he was photographed arriving outside Clive’s flat the next morning by a young, budding rock journalist, who happened to be yours truly ie, me.

After asking his sister if she’d move to Cambridge and join the band, taking bass guitar and very occasional backing vocal duties, and getting another “yes”, Clive had his group together:

Lead vocals/rhythm guitar – Clive Masters

Co-lead vocals/lead guitar – Benji Wendle

Bass instruments/keyboards/occasional backing vocals – Wendy Masters

Drums/percussion/ethnic sounds and general other noises – Mahatma Coat

Masters announced one morning, over coffee and mushrooms on toast that he’d decided on a name for the group: ‘Nutmeg’. A legend was being forged, and nobody knew about it. Or cared. “Give it time” my mind told me.

They quickly developed a sound all of their own and the burgeoning songwriting partnership of Masters/Wendle began producing gem after gem – songs which would one day be treated as folk/pop/rock standards and played on folk/pop/rock radio stations all over the country, if not further afield, in fields. They gigged solidly for a year or so and built up a small army of devoted fans, this writer (me) amongst them (other guys).

It was at one of these early shows that things really started moving for the band, and I’m not talking about the time they restarted their van’s engine with a dodgy generator on the M4! - They had entered the 1977 “Folk-Off” at the Honiton Easter Music Egg Hunt (just a music festival competition with some lost eggs) and had trounced the locally based competition. They beat such Devon-based greats of the time as ’The Scarecrow Johnny Ogilvy” and “The Flaming Theakstons”. There was one man present at this particular show who was to change their lives. He was an Irishman. One with power. Terry Wogan was this powerful Irishman’s name.

The song which had seen Nutmeg win the “Folk-Off”; the song that had beaten Little Patty Sunshine with “That Can’t Be Right, Daddy” and Even and the Stevens with “A Generous Hot Portion of Love” (not to mention the performances by the aforementioned acts; The Scarecrow Johnny Ogilvy and The Flaming Theakstons) was a recent composition by Clive and Benji.

“(There’s a) Wasp in my Welly” had been written the day before it was first performed. Much like an unfussy mother-to-be, it had been knocked up in the back of a black van speeding up the motorway. An instantly recognisable classic, at the “Folk-Off”, it caught Mr Terry Wogan’s ears. The ever fun and friendly Irish broadcaster alerted his friends on the committee choosing that year’s song for the Eurovision Song Contest. Wogan pulled some serious strings and, before anyone knew what was happening, “(There’s a) Wasp in my Welly” was the UK entry for the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest.

Hosted by Angela Rippon on May 7th, the competition could have shot Nutmeg into the pop-music-stratosphere. Instead, French entrant Marie Myriam won with an awful song called “The Bird and the Child”. It really was dreadful. However, second place is no disgrace, and Nutmeg returned to Cambridge as heroes.

Record company interest was immediate, and following a bidding, if not “war”, then at least a small fist fight, Onion Records signed Nutmeg on June 16th. Things were getting serious now, and the group needed representation. In stepped Benji’s father. Lenny Wendle, a lifelong fence erector at livestock based events, as well as a bit of a folk-fan, became the band’s manager and mentor.

Onion acted quickly and booked the group into London’s famous Happy Road Studios. Here they recorded “(There’s a) Wasp in my Welly” and much of the material which comprised their first album.

“(There’s a) Wasp in my Welly” was released as a single in July, and climbed to number two in the charts – held off the top spot my Donna Summer’s boring effort “I Feel Love”.

Monday July 25th saw the release of “(A Pinch of…) Nutmeg” – a classic statement of intent, in LP form, by a band on the verge of greatness. From the foot-stomping, folky funk of opener “O’er my Dead Body” through mid-album, mid-tempo mood setters such as “Here’s my Heart, so Break it, Wench” and “Just a Village Idiot, and More Fool Me” to fast-paced proto-folk-punk – just listen again to “Watch the Fat Man Dance!” or “Seriously Cross-Roads”.

Contemporary reviews were, to be polite, mixed. The NME didn’t like it; “anything worth hearing here is hidden underneath layers of pretension and weirdness” wrote Leo Drugsonhats.

“I really think it’s shit”, said Tony McConnor in Rolling Stone magazine, but Ian Haworth, writing for the Exeter Express and Echo used the words “fine” and “thanks”.

While journalists were busy burying their word-hatchets in this music-record, the general public were busy buying it in their droves (and that’s not the past tense for drives – I’ve checked). It’s hard to picture it now, but in the summer of 1977, everybody was doing the “Wasp in My Welly” dance. It became a staple at weddings and in playgrounds throughout the land and, as a consequence, the record rocketed to number forty one on the charts and stayed there for a week. Bad reviews be damned.

The "wasp in my welly" dance reportedly inspired the Honiton Dance Festival, which survives to this (very) day, and is perhaps one of the only places you'll still see people "wasping" and "wellying". Nutmeg returned the favour by being inspired back by the town of Honiton. It repeatedly features on Side 1 of "Camelot Calling".

Riding high on the not inconsiderable fame and success of their latest signing, Onion Records released a second single from the album, a haunting ballad entitled “Rain is Pain, But Sun is Fun” a song which addressed climate change years before it was trendy. Although not a “hit”, the song still stands as a chilling reminder, from the past, about the future.

Disappointed by the baffling failure of this track on the hit-parade, Onion were forced into a cocked hat. The predominance of the punk rockers and all their spitting and spikes meant that genuinely talented talents such as Nutmeg were being shown the door – quite literally in Clive’s case, as on the evening his band was dropped by the record company he got lost and couldn’t find his way out of the building. A kindly security man called Ted eventually showed him where the door was.

Clive Masters took this rejection badly and severed his ties, also cutting off contact with the rest of the band. He retreated from public life and moved to a lighthouse in Tintagel, Cornwall, which he’d inherited from a dead aunt. His plan was to start a school for cats, but this idea failed dismally. After many months of kicking his feet he realised, too, that his dreams of becoming a professional footballer were going nowhere. What did he do? He installed a telephone line at the lighthouse and used it to call an old friend.

Mahatma Coat moved into “Mary Lighthouse” as Clive’s abode was now informally called, and proceeded to take Clive on a journey of recovery. Furious bouts of mutual meditation would fill up their mornings, and evenings would be spent clambering about craggy cliff tops, high on top-strength mead. In between, they would work. They converted the upper chamber of the LH into a state of the art recording studio – cardboard egg-boxes on the wall – sneaker soles under the Afghan rugs on the floor. The works.

A minor snag occurred one night when eight fishermen died. Their trawler had hit rocks just off the shore, as the lighthouse beam had temporarily been turned off while Clive installed a new coffee machine. This has been dealt with by the courts, and Clive Masters was not found guilty of neglect of anything, including “duty” or “responsibility of care”.

Clive installed some recording equipment he’d won off Steve Harley (and one of the Cockney Rebels) in a game of Mousetrap, and he was set. Around the same time, he decided to set up his own record label; “Beatroot Records” which would still have distribution (under contract) with the big company Onion had been affiliated with – Sony.

One day, Clive was having his hair cut in Tintagel when the chap doing said cutting said seven revolutionary words:

"Time to record a solo album, Sir?"

'Time to Record a Solo Album, Sir?' was Clive’s first musical outing on his own. With encouraging chanting and syncopated finger-cymbal-tapping from M Coat, this was Clive stripped and raw.

“I wrote the songs in the nude, recorded them nude and I expect everyone who listens to it to take their clothes off before they listen to it” said Masters in an interview which was written up, but never published, in the Guardian.

Not a popular record, “TTRASAS?” was deleted sixth months later, and currently reaches up to £7.00 on eBay. How wrong the world is! This album contains the exquisite suite of electric woodwind exercises “The Littlest Oboe” and also a hidden pop gem – “Don’t Turn The Lights Out, Lucy, I’ve Got Something in my Ear”. If you see this one at a record fair, buy it!

Clive’s second solo record (also recorded in Mary Lighthouse) was appalling. Mahatma had retreated into a dope/caffeine/sugar/nightnurse dependency routine by this point, and his influence on the recording of what was to become “Breaking The (Faery) Lore” was profound. His nonsensical lyrical ideas and persistent sneezing helped produce such stinkers as “That Folk’s Not Funny Anymore” and “Clunk Nuts Part 2”.

The only man, apart from Mahatma Coat, who still believed in Clive was Lenny Wendle..

Clive had split the band up when things had looked bleak. He’d done what we’d all do - move into a lighthouse in order to create sad music with a mysterious man.

Lenny remained his manager though, whatever happened to the band. And it was Lenny Wendle’s sure hand that was to smack Clive’s artistic bum, if you will (who wouldn’t?). Wendle Senior drove down to Cornwall to talk to his son in law.

Yup, you heard me right. Benji (his best friend) had married Wendy (his only sister) and Clive has since told me that he was “a bit cross, yes”. He had been invited to the wedding, which took place at Stonehenge on Christmas eve 1979, but had been unable to attend due to an infected toenail complication lawsuit.

Benji and Wendy had become close shortly after Nutmeg split, and had collaborated in the recording studio as well as in the bedroom. Benji and Wendy had had a huge hit record in Portugal with “The Ploughman’s Lunch” in 1978, and had gone on to record and release an LP, “What a Pickle!”, which reached number four in the Portuguese album charts. They were doing okay, but Lenny reckoned that a Nutmeg reunion was on the cards, and this is why he was driving down to Cornwall to speak to Clive.

Mahatma let Lenny in and led him up to Clive’s “lair”. The two men embraced, and then all three of them did. I was watching (from behind a big dog) as Clive had asked me to be present, in order to document anything of import (important stuff). Lenny asked Clive how the songwriting was going and Clive said it was going very well, thanks. Lenny then asked Clive if he would be interested in participating in a Nutmeg reunion.

“If you guys record an album together, it’s going to be good” he understated. “I’ll give you all six months to do it, and we’ll talk about the money then”. A smooth operator. Clive agreed after hearing that Benji and Wendy had been experiencing problems in their marriage.

Band "visual vision" by Jeff Banks

Even though Lenny Wendle died shortly after this meeting (he was mown down by a joyrider in an ice-cream van), “Camelot Calling” came to fruition. Recorded quickly over a fraught ten months, from March until December 1979, sessions were not easy, with Benji and Wendy bickering, Mahatma mainly lying on the floor, and Clive drunkenly pressing the wrong buttons on the wrong pieces of equipment. The album was finished on 10/12/79 and a hastily arranged photo-shoot that afternoon saw the iconic cover image get snapped.

Released a few days later (14/12/79), the album didn’t sell well. The London “punk” band The Clash released a record the same day called “London Calling” and the Nutmeg camp suspected that their sales were suffering because of the similar titles. That and the fact that on the front cover you could see Benji’s foreskin – which led to the record being withdrawn from most major retailers – although you could still buy it in Woolworths if you asked nicely.

Devastated yet again, Masters retreated to his Mary Lighthouse lair, where he has remained, and silently so, until very recently. In early 2012, Clive began trawling through some old master-tapes and the whole of the internet has been almost on fire with rumours about new Masters' master-tapes music stuff ever since…

Pass me a bucket of internet sand – It’s time to put the rumour fires out:

A NEW ALBUM BY CLIVE MASTERS (and some of Nutmeg) IS NEARLY READY FOR RELEASE!

Featuring new songs and some tarted-up old ones, this album promises to be everything the Nutmeg/Masters fan is waiting for…

Ahem…

Two words: “Robin” and “Hood".