Flat: High & Dry In South Suffolk

Flat is a series of pieces on some trips I made into the heart of East Anglia with a little bit of music listening thrown in for good measure along the way. This is the first part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers driving up from Woodford in Essex to Felixstowe on the east coast of England.

It was a trip I had been meaning to make for a while but just hadn’t the chance, in fact it had taken me years to do it, dunno why, a straight through the heart of Essex ride into South Suffolk and then all the way to Felixstowe on the east coast. I was out of the blocks by 10 in the morning, with How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful by Florence + The Machine burning onto the hard drive of my Toyota Prius. Yes, my faithful old Prius, a car I had bought brand new, the only time I had ever done so, and which had now done over 84,000 miles in what would soon be coming up to nine years of proud ownership.

Once out of Woodford I drove straight up the M11 to Stansted just past junction 8. A few years ago it seemed like I was going up to Stansted quite often, every other month in fact, but over the course of time all that had tailed off considerably, now it was probably over 10 years since I had last been there. How time flies, whilst I hadn’t, or at least not from Stansted. I had driven past it plenty of times in that period though, usually making my way up the M11 to either join the A14, A11, A1 or to just go to Cambridge, so it was familiar enough territory.

It was a fine Friday, not deep blue skies but light blue skies with high clouds warm and bright, the land looking dry, early June in what was possibly going to be a long, hot summer. The choice of Florence + The Machine for the car ride had been a direct consequence of buying their How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album after seeing them support The Rolling Stones at the Olympic Stadium in London back in May. Bought it at the HMV Store in Stratford Westfield, yes, bought Florence on one of those HMV 2 CDs for 10 quid special offer bundles I was so fond of and which I have indulged in so many times over the rollin’ years. Now I was in the process of playing and burning it onto the Prius hard drive, on which could be transferred over 100 CDs of music, something that I always thought was pretty cool, although of course in terms of how music’s currently consumed, is now tremendously outdated.

In that regard I had brought along a couple of other CDs to burn for the trip, Vessel by Twenty One Pilots and Def Leppard’s classic 1981 album High n’ Dry, this one being freshly re-mastered and taken from out of their CD Collection Volume One box set which had been released at the beginning of June and which I had just recently purchased. Needless to say I had filled up all the space on the Prius hard drive many moons ago, but the great thing about it was that albums could be deleted once I got tired of them, thus freeing up space again to stick some new stuff on. All in all these three albums would be more than enough for me to be getting on with as far as the listening to music in the car was concerned whilst making my way up to Felixstowe and then back down again.

Made fast progress up the M11 with there being no major incidents to hold things up, within 25 minutes I had filtered onto the A120 and was soon flying past Stansted. It was not that busy on the dual carriageway stretch, all was clear and driving on it was like a dream. A bit of a surprise to be honest, and I realised it must have been around 20 years since I had last driven on that part of the A120. Back then it had not been a double lane affair and driving it had been a bitch, stop start all the way, with the pinch point place of Great Dunmow being particularly painful, all in the days when I had a lot less patience than what I have now, or at least what I hope I have now. This time it was a different story and in the best possible way. As I headed due east towards Braintree, with open skies above me and clouds beginning to break into the blue beyond, there was nothing to stop me from going as fast as I liked, well apart from the fact I was driving a Toyota Prius of course, and not an Audi.

I had decided to take the A120 route east of Stansted because I wanted to check out a place called Castle Hedingham which lay between Braintree and Haverhill in North Essex and just off the A1017. It was somewhere which I had been meaning to visit for some time but had just never got around to, the idea too far submerged within my consciousness to ever turn into reality. But now time and space had suddenly popped things open for me to change all that and I was therefore taking the opportunity to get it done. My ex-neighbour in Woodford, Tim “Timbo” De Freitas, had always been going on about it, saying it was worth taking a trip to if I ever had the time; lovely castle, stunning views blah ze blah ze blah ze. Now at last I was in a position to take him up on his suggestion, to see what all the fuss was about. When I had been working out my route on Google I also noticed that there was an outlet park in Braintree called Braintree Freeport so I thought that on my way to Castle Hedingham I would have a look at that as well. Give it the once over so to speak, see what was there. Might be a place for the future, a shopping location me and my wife Dawa Dolkar could go to in order to check things out from time to time, somewhere different from the usual places we ended up – Lakeside Thurrock, Bluewater in Kent, Stratford Westfield, Hatfield Galleria. Why not add Braintree to the list as well? So I would simply drop in, see what the Freeport had to offer.

I was out the door by 10, more or less ready to rock. Just seems to take more time these days, a bit longer to get going, things are not as simple as they used to be. This time around I had a list of what I had to put into my back pack –

mobile – wallet – sunglasses – reading glasses – notebook (just in case) – pen – CDs to burn – hay fever pills – tissues baseball cap – shirt

– all of it stuff deemed necessary for the trip. There used to be a time when I would have been able to slip out of the door, ready to get out there into the big wide world with hardly a thing on me. But as to where I was now, well I guess it was just a sign of my age, that I was no longer so freewheelin’ as I used to be.

The drive was fast and painless once I finally got going, with Florence + The Machine for company in those initial stages providing pounding new renaissance anthems cut through with a twist of Celtic splash and a windswept voice from the south side of the city to accompany them. Got to Braintree by 10.45 in the morning, then after that there was a tricky bit of adjustment to do, coming off the A120 so as to find the right entry road into Freeport, something which involved negotiating a couple of busy mini-roundabouts where other drivers seemed to be in no mood to take any prisoners. Survival of the fittest is what I guess you might call it. Well, that was Essex for you, the heart of Essex at that, and to be honest I wouldn’t have expected it to be anything different to what it was.

All the same I managed to overcome my perplexity, nervousness even, and was soon safely parked up outside the Braintree Freeport outlet village well before 11. I decided that I might as well take a look around and see what it had to offer, have a quick squint in other words, check out the clobber. Soon found there was a decent enough spread of the kind of shops you find in such places – Nike, Adidas, Next, M & S, Clarks, White Stuff, Denby, Tefal, Ralf Lauren, Lacoste, Whittard – and plenty more besides. In addition there were also the usual places to eat and drink – Costa, Bill’s, Starbucks, Wildwood, Pizza Express – you know the score, seen it so many times in so many places up and down the land to various degrees of refinement. All the same it was pleasant taking a stroll through it all in the warmth of the mid morning now that all the clouds had broken and the day was getting nice and hot. It was good to have a stretch of my legs after the car ride from Woodford, good to wander around somewhere new, even if at the end of the day it was just a walk through an outlet village slap bang in the middle of Essex.

A text came through on my mobile whilst I was walking around Freeport, a text notification of a tweet from Echo and the Bunnymen, one of my favourite groups and whose Twitter account I followed. It was a tweet announcing a handful of European shows they would be playing in the autumn to support their forthcoming The Stars, The Ocean and The Moon, an album which, along with a couple of new songs, was going to contain re-workings of a bunch of their classics from the early 80’s, – Killing Moon, The Cutter, Bring On The Dancing Horses and all that. The main thing about the tweet that caught my attention was that one of the shows was going to be in Berlin and it did not take me long to think how cool it might be to go over there and see them play. It would mean that I could combine seeing The Bunnymen and catching up with my old friend Thomas Deilecke who lived in Berlin with his wife and daughter, having done so for many years. Thomas features prominently in a number of pieces of writing found on my online writing archive, a website called Traceless Path, specifically in a tale on there by the name of Tiger Trails,somethingwhich documents a road trip up the west coast of India we did together from Trivandrum in Kerala to Bombay.

Fact of the matter was that we went way back, all the way to 1988, when we had first met at a meditation course given in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery called Kopan located on the outskirts of Kathmandu in Nepal. By a simple twist of fate we had shared the same room for the duration of the course, along with another German by the name of Daniel Rau who was from Stuttgart down in the south of the country. The last time I had gone over to Berlin to see Thomas was back in 2013, five years ago now, when we had also seen a couple of Bob Dylan shows at the Tempodrom, a venue which was modelled on a circus tent and just round the corner from the Reichstag in the centre of town. The shows were pretty good, the first one especially, in fact it had been borderline fantastic, and both had featured a lot of songs from Bob’s critically acclaimed 2012 album Tempest. Some of them performed live had worked exceptionally well; Long and Wasted Years, Pay in Blood and Early Roman Kings in particular. The commitment Bob had shown in performing them at the Tempodrom had been incredible, sweat dripping down the sides of his face for the whole damn show on both nights.

By way of returning the compliment, if you could call it that, Thomas had come over to London a couple of years later in 2015 to stay with me, where we had seen Bob Dylan again, this time just the once, at the Royal Albert Hall and where he had not been in such good form. There he had been playing the final one of five straight nights in a row, and he looked knackered. Not only that, the day before seeing Bob at the Royal Albert Hall, we had also caught a solo show in Henley-on-Thames performed by Ian McCulloch, lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen. This one I thought was pretty tremendous, despite the fact McCulloch was clearly pissed and his guitar kept going out of tune. It was nearly as good as when I had seen him perform at the Zombie Hut in Corby just over a year before that in 2014, again solo, where this time McCulloch had been accompanied by Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds and they quite simply tore the place apart. No doubt about it, it was great to see that Bunnymen tweet, it really cheered me up, even though I was feeling good anyway, but it just added to the wellness. I had already been thinking of getting tickets for some Echo and the Bunnymen shows in the UK which had been announced a week or so earlier than these new European ones. Thinking of either going down to see the Bunnymen in my hometown of Cardiff or catching a show in London where they were playing a few nights at the London Palladium.

2018 was possibly not going to be a bad year as far as live music was concerned. I mean don’t get me wrong, I was hardly a concert going record breaker, but even so there were some quality gigs in the offing. Already in May I had seen The Rolling Stones play the Olympic Park in Stratford where they had been supported by Florence + The Machine, a concert which I’d thoroughly enjoyed and wrote about in No Filter named, somewhat unimaginatively, after The Rolling Stones No Filter tour. Apart from those Bunnymen shows I was thinking of attending, I had also bought tickets to see Def Leppard at the O2 in London, where they would be playing their blockbusting Hysteria album in full, plus no doubt, a selection of favourites – Rock Of Ages, Photograph and probably a few others. It was a concert I was very much looking forward to, because I must admit to having had a soft spot for Def Leppard for many years, despite the fact they are hardly looked upon as cool, in fact as far as the vast majority of music critics are concerned, they are usually little more than sneered at, which is a great shame, most unfortunate. For their London O2 show Def Leppard would be supported by Cheap Trick, whose Live at Budokan was one of my favourite albums from the 70’s, so I was keen to see them as well, but that show was not until December. So to be able to go and see Echo and the Bunnymen in Berlin at the end of October would do really rather nicely, especially if my old buddy Thomas Deilecke was either sitting or standing next to me as well.

Guess I roamed around the outlet village of Freeport Braintree for around 30 – 40 minutes and ended up buying a couple of pairs of jeans, a short sleeved shirt and a bunch of socks; all for around £75 quid from a Next Outlet shop. I have to say it had a good selection of clothes at very good prices, better than any of the other Next shops I had visited, and I guess that over the years I had been to more than one or two of them, mainly because Next was my usual port of call when it came to shopping for clothes. Whether that was a good or a bad thing I really don’t know, possibly bad, if not a little sad. Nevertheless I was pretty pleased with my purchases, very pleased indeed, and I made a note to most definitely come back to Braintree Freeport again, only next time I would make sure it was with Dawa Dolkar because she would probably love it, and if she was happy then I was happy, simple as that.

Out of Braintree Freeport, I was now no longer on the A120 but the A131 heading in the direction of Sudbury, where after a few miles I would be turning off onto the A1017 to Castle Hedingham, and sure enough after 5 or 10 minutes that fork in the road appeared for me to make my turn. It wasn’t long before the countryside became more and more idyllic, prettier and prettier, almost picture perfect as I made my way through north Essex and into south Suffolk. Guess it was like there was another kinda life to be lived in that part of the world, a life which I was simply unaware of, having been stuck for years an’ years in the big, bad city. Difficult to describe, but as I was driving along with the car windows wide open, warm summer breezes blowing in and over my face, it felt like the consciousness of man had implanted itself upon the scenery so as to take me flying into a different dimension. Make sense? Probably not.

As far as the music in my Prius was concerned I was now out of the world of Florence + The Machine and into Def Leppard by way of High ‘N’ Dry from their CD Collection Volume One box set,something for which I had paid quite a lot of money, nearly 60 quid. I’d justified the expenditure to myself because I had recently come into a few quid from an endowment policy which had matured, paying out a little bit more than what I had been expecting in the process. So naturally enough, when it came to the box set, I’d thought what the hell, might as well just go for it. It was a bit of a guilty pleasure you see, being into Def Leppard, I mean not all of the time for sure, but sometimes on occasion, most definitely! All the same, since pressing the button on the box set, it had been nagging away at me that it might have all been a little bit over the top, one indulgence too many shall we say.

In case you’re interested, what was in the box set were freshly re-mastered editions of the first four Def Leppard studio albums – On Through the Night, High ‘N’ Dry, Pyromania and Hysteria; a CD of rarities called, stunningly enough, Rarities; a live album in the form of Live at the LA Forum 1983 from their Pyromania tour which, amazingly, was recorded live at the LA Forum in 1983; and finally a mini CD of the first ever Def Leppard EP which contained three songs on it. These were the contents as far as the music was concerned, taking in the period 1980 – 1987. You also got a sturdy box in which each of the above CDs were housed, with good quality cardboard covers and inner sleeves, all boasting rather fine artwork and a hardcover illustrated booklet of essays with contributions from band members Joe Elliott, Rick Savage, Rick Allen and Phil Collen, plus to top it all off, comprehensive notes for each album from rock journalist Paul Elliott who was no relation to Joe.

Not bad really, it had to be said, and it was mine all mine thank you very much for just £59.99, purchased once again from my local HMV Store in Westfield, Stratford. There was no doubt I had most of the music in some shape or form already, for example the Live at the LA Forum 1983 CD. This one had been made available as part of a deluxe edition of Pyromania released back in 2006, and which, naturally enough, I had bought a copy of at the time. On closer analysis, I think that what could have made this new box set more attractive would have been to have included In The Round In Your Face, another live Def Leppard album, this time from 1987, and which had recently been bundled into the Super Deluxe edition of the 2017 re-master of their multi-million selling Hysteria album. Now if that had been there, then this box set really would have been something special, but don’t get me wrong, it was excellent as it was, nevertheless if In The Round In Your Face had got the nod over Live at the LA Forum 1983, then that would have just been the icing on the cake. Despite my misgivings over the price, the simple fact of the matter was that I had to get my hands on this new box set, especially because all of the material contained in it had been re-mastered up by long term Def Leppard sound man Ronan McHugh. All of the clean-up work and digital enhancement being done in Joe’s Garage, their purpose built recording studio located over in Dublin. In particular I was keen on hearing the first two albums, On Through the Night and High ‘N’ Dry because they had been somewhat neglected as far as the restoration process of Def Leppard’s body of work was concerned, but now they had finally been given the full 21^st century sonic tweak treatment.

As it turned out for this particular little trip I was to end up having High ‘N’ Dry on continuous play long after its contents had been burned onto the hard drive of my Prius. Just could not take out the disc, couldn’t hit the eject button, just couldn’t get enough of it and by the end, if indeed there was an end, I had come to the conclusion that it was brilliant, an incredible album from way back in early Def Leppard history, which with its digital spruce up now sounded fantastic. High ‘N’ Dry was in fact the first album in Def Leppard’s Robert “Mutt” Lange produced trilogy that continued with 1983’s Pyromania and concluded with Hysteria which came out in 1987. This last album took over two years to record and became something of a worldwide phenomenon, due in no small part to Mutt Lange’s magical production, projecting the band into that rarefied sphere of global rock stars, a place which they continue to inhabit to this very day. Not that you would ever know it as far as the critics are concerned, within whose circles Def Leppard are always given short shrift. They are a band who would never in a million years be considered cool enough to grace the covers of music magazines such as Mojo or Uncut. All of which is a bit of a pity because they are true masters of their craft, but is perhaps not too surprising given their level of commercial success, especially in America.

So yes, I guess you could say that I got into this re-master, the freshened up sound of High ‘N’ Dry. Not quite as raw as On Through the Night, not quite as polished as Pyromania, but standing in its own territory. In many ways it is Def Leppard’s AC/DC album by way of the musical landscapes created, songs with tension lurking towards the back of them like a rolling thunder, taking you to those twilight places which lie between day and night. Overall the strength of the material is tremendous, timeless riffs with a beauty and structure to them which sound nothing short of stunning when played at high volume. This was especially the case whilst riding through the high and dry countryside of South Suffolk in the early days of what was shaping up to be a long, hot summer. It dawned on me that in many ways High ‘N’ Dry was early gold in the Def Leppard canon, a work which provides a link in the jigsaw between what they originally were and what they subsequently became. By that I mean they started off riding the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, alongside the likes of Iron Maiden and Saxon, yet they ended up being pop, albeit with a substantial slice of rock, and closer in sound to groups like Queen where multi-layered harmonics are the order of the day. This is the album which lies on the border in the course of that journey, where songs such as Another Hit & Run, High ‘N’ Dry (Saturday Night), Bringin’ on the Heartbreak, Switch 625 and Mirror, Mirror carry with them a desolate yet at the same time welcoming sense of foreboding which they never tapped into quite so powerfully ever again. Def Leppard were on repeat play in the Prius for at least the next hour or so, then later in the day when I made my way back home from Felixstowe I had another blast of them and I can only say that I loved every bit of feeling so very, very High ‘N’ Dry whilst driving thru’ those dust lands of South Suffolk, making my way both to and from the east coast.

As for Castle Hedingham it turned out to be closed for the day by the time I got there, which I guess was only around 12.30, just after I had fuelled up in a local garage and asked for directions when I was in danger of getting lost. Thought it was gonna be a castle looked after by the National Trust or something like that, but instead it was privately owned and all shut off, obviously being an events venue for weddings, banquets and other such functions. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Not my kind of scene really, which made me wonder just what Timbo Tim had being going on about when he said I had to go there. I wasn’t that disappointed if truth be told, not that sad that I wouldn’t be able to get out of the car and have a look around. There was something about the whole damn place – castle, village, countryside – which was all just a little bit too picture perfect for me, with seemingly not a single flower out of place. The great hiding away of the true nature of the human condition was how it struck me, but then again, how did I really know that? Anyway, whatever, Castle Hedingham was not for me. I realised I needed to get out of there, go someplace a bit more wild and open, therefore I followed through on what had been on my mind when I had set out that morning, and that was to go to Felixstowe where I could eat some fish and chips by the sea.

Fact of the matter was that I had last been to Felixstowe a few years ago when Dawa Dolkar and I hired a caravan in the Suffolk Sands Caravan Park for a couple of blazing hot days in the middle of July 2016. I had really enjoyed it back then, there was something about the place which I’d really liked, maybe it was the rows of port cranes standing sentinel on the horizon, the fact that things were working there 24/7, I just don’t know. Guess if I think about it, one of the reasons why those days were so damn good was because they were just after I had worked my last ever shift at Wisdom Books, the small book distribution company I’d helped to run for 27 years before finally pulling the plug and calling in the administrators. Felixstowe was therefore symbolic to me of a new beginning, even if at the end of the day it was only on the east coast of Suffolk, not deep within the Australian Outback, high up in the Himalayas, or anything like that.

In consequence of my decision to head to Felixstowe I stayed on the A1017 for just a few more miles past Castle Hedingham before turning onto the A1092, a quiet road which took me through some more amazing countryside with beautiful places, all just a little too perfect and precise for me to want to stop and walk around them – Clare, Cavendish, Long Melford. I rode on through with High ‘N’ Dry blasting out of my Prius, windows wide open to let in some of that warm June air, which along with the music felt so good for my soul, even though I would never be able to explain precisely why. The A1092 led me down the Clare valley onto the A134 which then took me straight up to the market town of Bury St. Edmunds, and after that it was just a simple question of joining the A14 eastbound so as to make my way down to the end of it where Felixstowe lay on the coast. Soon I was heading due east driving past Ipswich and up on the high bridge over the Orwell River, taking me to the port of Felixstowe, after which there was nowhere else to go except straight into the North Sea.