Dead In Your Garden wrote itself on the 15 minute cycle ride to work one morning. I put on my white coat, sat down at my bench in the lab and wrote down the words, the keyboard tune, and the bassline. Took it to the band the same night. I asked Dave the drummer to play a straight 4/4, a phrase I’d only just learnt, and he did but with one of his signature twists. The song was too high for me to sing comfortably but we left it. Simon added some keyboard lines to the chorus, Barry stuck in a no 3rd B at the end of each verse line. Little things made all the difference to a straightforward punky pop song, and it never occurred to me until years later – at Heartstops guitarist Alan’s 40th – that the words were a bit dark and slightly twisted.
Songs are like children, you want them to go off and have a successful life of their own. We worked really hard to make that happen. We played gigs at the Chichester Rock Society (‘Rocksoc’), met local journalist Eddie Riff, he put us in the frame to record a couple of songs for a local record label’s project, Seaside Rock.
Barry took the record to Paul Weller. We supported the Jam. He took it to John Peel. We were on Radio 1. He sent it to record companies, and they flocked to see us play in London. Polydor paid for us to get into a studio to record it. We did that too, with ‘Boy Wonders’ as the B-side.
That was as far as Jump In Your Datsun went. But the song is catchy. We recorded it at Airship in Bognor, and again at Alaska studios in Waterloo, produced by Tim Parry and engineered by Pat Collier (of The Vibrators). I have a copy on vinyl of the Seaside Rock recordings, and a quarter inch tape in the loft somewhere. I have a very wobbly cassette copy of the single recorded in London. So, 35 years on, I have recorded a new version of the song.