Ottawa Company third concert series: Anthony Marshall, CC, John Greaves, Dave Stewart, Clive Brooks

In 1971, I was looking for a group to be in, or people to form one with. On the way, I met a lot of interesting composers and players. One of those was Dave Stewart, then playing with Egg. I went to various concerts of theirs (I met Lindsay Cooper for the first time at an Egg and Comus concert when Lindsay was playing in Comus). One evening, Dave and I hit on the idea of forming a rock composer's orchestra - a pool of musicians and composers who would perform one another's music. Out of this conversation The Ottawa Music Co. emerged. There were three series' of concerts. My notes say the first began in Redhill on Sept 2, 1971. The second and third are hazy I'm afraid, but the constitution of the group changed between series' - mainly, more people were added. After the first series I joined Henry Cow and they all became members of the Company too. By the end there were 22 musicians involved. Ottawa also appeared at one of Henry Cow's Cabaret Voltaire evenings in 1972, and at a special Sunday Matinee organised by Henry Cow during its residency at the Watford Palace Theatre (we had written and were performing music there for Rob Walker's production of Euripides' The Bacchae). This last Ottawa show I remember as being particularly over-the-top, involving, the band breaking up on stage at the end of part 1, and in parts 2 and 3 the various splinter groups formed by disaffected members performing - with comments from their disaffected ex band associates. There was also a narrator who kept the public (mis) informed about what was going on, and at one point I remember (Egg's) Mont Campbell swinging across the stage on a rope shouting 'It's a mug's game'...  Although we were formed to play each other's compositions, we did also sometimes play pieces by other people: Peaches en Regalia, Moon In June (sung by Barbara Gaskin), Dali's Car, The Savage, Smoke gets in Your Eyes and There's No Business like Show Business. Needless to say, we ran the concerts ourselves and money they did not make. But it was inspiring. And fun.

Ottawa Musicc Company 3: Tim Hodgkinson, Dirk 'Mont' Campbell, Barbara Gaskin, Jeremy Baines, Amanda Parsons, Anne Rosenthal, Clive Brooks.Fred Frith, Dave Stewart

The surviving programme for the second series of Ottawa concerts tells me that the company then consisted of:

Bob Dylan (of whom I was and am a great admirer) reputedly once said of a concert 'That was worse than Ottawa and Ottawa was the worst goddamned hole in the universe'.

P.S. There's a lot more about this period which will wait until Aymeric Leroy finished his book- I agreed to hold it off the site until then.

back to Bands (groups and affiliations) main page