‘As I’ve tried to explain, Gonby: it isn’t the pedal itself. It’s what the pedal signifies.’

I looked carefully at Billy Penk. There was much signification with him these days, and I was wary of fuelling the rather feverish mind that penned the libretto to the prog rock opera, ‘Sunset Over The Forest Palace to which The Scrolls Alluded,’ to be performed in its entirety that evening at the Greyhound, on Fulham Palace Road, without, as things stood, a Jim Dunlop Cry Baby Wah pedal. On the way down from Wolverhampton in his Mini panel van (repainted since the 60cwt days, and featuring a pastoral landscape tricked out with goblins, medieval architecture, female apparitions and the like) he’d been telling and retelling the story of the concept, coming up with prequels, sequels and spin-offs; singing along to the album (released on cassette and Quad8 through Billy’s own Oscillator Records, catalogue number OSC01) and explaining – endlessly explaining – the symbolism at work not only in the lyrics but also in the particular instrumental choices in the arrangement.

Cod-symphonic virtuoso noodling…

This was all a far cry from the free-wheeling psychedelia of The 60cwt, of course. Billy had left the electric jug and his ‘General Semantics’ persona behind when the group´s bugle player, Sgt Trevor Pearce, was sent to Cyprus with the Royal Artillery. Disbanding the 60cwt and picking up the guitar again, he set about an intense practice regime which saw his style develop from the jangly Merseybeat rhythm playing he’d used in The Selves into cod-symphonic virtuoso noodling like a Steve Hackett stress dream. Unable to afford a TV licence and deeply affected by adverts featuring Detector Vans, he’d also taken to reading fantasy literature during the twenty or thirty minutes of the day that he was practising sweep-picking runs in the Lydian mode. After three dozen classified ads in the Express and Star, and a widening of Billy’s original search to Tettenhall and Whitmore Reans, Embryosis was born.

A little late to the Progressive Fayre, Embryosis had been unable to attract major label interest in the UK (hence Oscillator ‘Records’), but had got a couple of encouraging nibbles from nerdy dweebs in Holland and Scandinavia. Billy was hoping they’d show up to the Greyhound and was pulling out all the stops for the showcase, including hiring me as a roadie. The budget didn’t extend to hiring a decent Transit van, though, and the Mini got us into SW6 well behind schedule. In a hurry to unload the gear before Harold “Chimdy” Sweep arrived for our pre-match drink, I’d balanced the wah-wah on a speaker cab I was carrying, and it had fallen, to its apparent death.

‘And All Your Sons Shall Be Known By Other Welsh-sounding Names’

Though not as intrinsic to Billy’s new sound as chorus and the volume pedal, the wah-wah had a crucial role to play (he was at pains to point out) in ‘Inside the Palace’ (the fifth ‘movement’ of ‘Sunset Over The Forest Palace to Which the Scrolls Alluded’). The meaning of its use here was multi-layered: on a representational level, the crying guitar would suggest the tears of the regal infant in ‘The Blue Velvet Booties of the One True King’; symbolically, it echoed the tears of the goblins driven from their home in the final part of the second ‘movement’, ‘And All Your Sons Shall Be Known By Other Welsh-sounding Names’; the shifting frequencies of the wah further illustrated the to-and-fro political shift in the Court of Vinelandia and the push-and-pull of their political relations with the Court of the Stone Feathers (Billy got notably lazier with his roman-a-clef names after the third movement: the Bush of Berries, the House by the Ford and Evermoreton all featured). According to Billy, the entire performance was doomed to failure if he didn’t get hold of another wah-wah pedal, or something very similar.

Billy’s musical career had always been subsidized by the DHSS, so there was no question of heading to Denmark Street and buying another Cry Baby. I got the number of the support act, Krud, and gave them a call, hoping to borrow one from them.

‘Nah, mate,’ said the voice on the other end of the line, with undisguised distain, ‘Effects are for hippies.’

Chimdy was our last hope. Though far more mechanical than electronic, he knew his way around a circuit board, and instantly identified that the frequency filter was broken in the wah-wah. With Rocky the dog in tow, we headed round to the local Tandy to see if they had one (they didn’t); and then to the Bedford Arms for a pint. Billy stayed at the Greyhound, carefully adding diacritic slashes and umlauts to the guest list.

‘Effects are for hippies.’

I´d always had a good relationship with Rocky, having known him since he was a puppy, and often bumping into him and Billy at the Oxley Arms when I was working at Good Year. When I’d occasionally roadied for the 60cwt, it had been my responsibility to gaffa tape the mic to him before a performance. He was very much a people dog but considered me part of his circle, and, though Billy wasn´t with us, the dog was content with a packet of scratchings and the occasional fuss. Chimdy didn´t have the same rapport with him, however, and when I visited the Gents during our second pint, I could clearly hear him whining for me. When I returned to our table, Chimdy was feverishly sketching a circuit diagram on the back of a flyer for that evening´s gig.

Chimdy’s idea was to split the signal, processing one half through a tiny reverb chamber containing Rocky the dog, and then mixing this back with the dry signal via a foot-rocker potentiometer. Thus, the guitarist could adjust how much whine went into his signal in real time. Small air holes were included in the chamber, partly so Rocky could breathe, but also to allow him to detect Billy’s scent, increasing his separation anxiety and reunion anticipation (SARA), which would produce a more reliable and sustained whine. Finishing our drinks, we headed back to Tandy´s and then onto the Greyhound, to begin constructing what we considered was probably the first guitar effect to incorporate a live animal.

We worked quickly, and, with the effects box constructed and tested (Billy pulled a bit of a face at the first rock of the footpedal, but you could tell deep down that he was pretty impressed) we headed out to Craven Cottage.

Wolves had made a decent start to life in the Second Division, unbeaten with six points from a possible eight. Willie Carr had bedded down well and was now pulling the strings in midfield, but he was unable to unlock Bobby Moore’s defence; for the home side, Georgie Best and Rodney Marsh had brought the crowd, but not their shooting boots, and the game ended scoreless. Winning at home and drawing away was supposedly how you won championships in those days, so we were not to upset at the result, and relieved that the showboaters didn’t make us look like fulls before the Match of the Day cameras.

Things at the Greyhound that evening were a good deal more disappointing. One important factor had been overlooked when designing the Cry Puppy: while the scent of Billy would reliably produce a whine from Rocky in isolation, the stench and noise of hippies and the yobbish followers of Krud would produce a much more aggressive response. Billy coped all right with this to begin with, as the pedal produced a subtle “woof-woof” effect, but as the noise and confusion grew, Rocky became agitated by every single note of the guitar, responding with a sharp bark which Chimdy called ‘yap-back delay’. It was extremely detrimental to the complex pomp of Embryosis, although some of the Krudités found it amusing, and started spitting at the box in appreciation.

If there were any A & R men at the gig, they certainly didn’t make themselves known to Billy, who, anyway, was very impressed by the aggressive recycling of rock’n’roll cliché that Krud had thrown up earlier: Embryosis was disbanded the following Tuesday, when Billy traded his Stratocaster in for a Les Paul Junior and formed The Gobs with spotty youths he met while signing on in Temple Street, reintegrating Rocky on backing vocals.

Chimdy didn’t give up on the idea of animal effects straight away, experimenting first with birds to produce a Dawn Chorus Pedal and Spring Chicken Reverb, before mic’ing up a whole honeycomb to produce a Beequalizer Pedal. More exotic designs, however, like the Flanger Baboons and an Ape Delay, would remain on the drawing board indefinitely.