PETE HOWELLS
Pete Howells was one of the two members of the psych-folk-rock band 'Blue Epitaph and came to record the 'Ode' LP in 1973. Like many others, they were students at nearby Bretton Hall, where Mike Levon had started recording LPs earlier. Pete and Jim Gordon became the band Magus, 1979 to 1982. Pete has contributed some acoustic guitar to The Wires CD 'In And Out Of Time' due out in 2007.

Pete Howells writes : Cass Yard and Recording Ode
 
Ode dear. Back in the early seventies, when no self-respecting teenager ever expected to reach thirty, it was as hard to get up early, in the depth of a Wakefield winter, as it was to go to bed at night. But we did it.
 
Spinning round the Bullring in a car you are sharing with a six-string acoustic, a bass guitar, a large bass amp and an even larger bass player would have been bad enough; sliding over the frosted Victorian cobbles as Rich Robinson attempted to turn the round car round in Cass Yard could almost have been the icing on the cake. But it wasn’t. Getting out of a Nineteen-Sixties Bubble car after such an experience, even when you are still in your teens is not easy.

Once we got inside we were welcomed by Mike Levon and taken up the tight staircase and shown into ‘Studio 1’ with its be-mattressed walls. Dave was setting up his drum kit in what would have been the far corner of the room if the room had been big enough to have had a far corner. I tried out the piano, the one with the brass drawing pins in the felt of the hammers, and a wiped out Jim Gordon came into the room with his guitar.

It was early; the Welsh chickens were clucking off the console speakers in time to the metronomic beat and within minutes we had the cans on and were picking through the first few bars of an Orange Room. Vietnam still cast its shadow, there was no Blood on any Tracks, Bowie was still the name of a knife and new money was still new.

We worked hard, Mike worked tirelessly, and we learned more through those hours than we ever expected to. Sustained by tea, bakery-snacks and by lock-ins in the Inn over the road on Kirkgate, we recorded and mixed and ripped tape off mirrors to produce what we produced, never for once expecting to be called to account some thirty five years later.

After all, we all thought we’d be dead before we reached thirty.