"His band, in its variously amended line-ups, was to frustrate and confound the Nottingham music scene throughout the eighties"
Mark Askwith was born the son of an RAF officer in Matlock in 1954. As he came of age in the sixties he was forcibly packed off to a Derbyshire public school (to his vehement loathing), before legging it to Nottingham, which would become his long-term home. He held down various jobs along the way. I recall one as a window cleaner when some disgruntled old boiler demanded to know his VAT number he replied ‘It’s one. I was the first bloke to get one.’ By his teens, Askwith had soon flourished into a very popular man with the ladies and yet was a proper blokes’ bloke, care of his dashing good looks and massive charisma.
By the mid-seventies, Askwith had infiltrated Nottingham’s local music scene. The advent of punk rock was Askwith’s meat and ale, as a boy who had been bestowed with every privilege in life and yet furiously despised the very mention of the word ‘privilege’.
In 1977 he formed and fronted on vocals a band called The Some Chicken, along with drummer Bob Fawcett (an old public school pal), guitarist Jez Adlington and Greasy Pete on bass and pies. Local entrepreneur Dave Nettleton went to see the band playing The Sandpiper in Commerce Square one Friday night and immediately badgered them into a management contract. The next morning he caught the morning train to London and landed them a tasty recording deal with his contacts down at Raw Records in Soho.
By Christmas 1981, Askwith was in a houseshare in West Bridgford affectionately known as the ‘111 Club’, from where he began to supervise boozing sorties to the nearby Test Match. Invited by its publicans to write a punk panto version of Snow White with ex-Matarka keyboardist Paul (The Skipper) Simons, the two then got very drunk when literally no-one turned up to see the performance. But instead of crying into their beers, they ordered many more and decided to recruit three other regulars (John Clegg on drums, Kevin Johnstone on bass and Andy Cope on vocals) and form a new band called The Chimneys.
In the following year, Arabian Daze suddenly re-charted big style and he rushed back to England to investigate his dues, only to find that former band-mate Adlington had been busy securing the copyright on all The Some Chicken songs for himself (he still reaps sole royalty benefits to this day). After a patchy spell of gigs thereafter, The Chimneys reformed in 1987, but Askwith had soon fallen out with Simons and left the band. When Johnstone also left to cope with a sudden shift of sexuality, Joe Planet, a refugee from the glory days down at the Hope and Anchor in Islington (he often sat in alongside Weller, Ian Dury, Dr. Feelgood, Shakin’ Stevens, U2, Graham Parker etc) was drafted in on guitar along with the Shedfixman on bass.
Yet soon the bickering returned. The Chimneys were in freefall over gig money, as pub and club owners took full advantage of the band’s drunkenness when it came
Mark Askwith died in July 2006 of a heart attack in a swimming pool in southern Spain. He was doing what he did every day of his life, effortlessly bringing joy to his family and everyone else around him. My mind will return every day to a lunchtime back in 1982, in the main bar of the Newshouse in St James Street, where I was then working as a barman. I was casually invited by Mark Askwith to go out for a beer or twenty six with The Chimneys later that evening. The best day’s work I’ve ever done in my life was to say ‘Okay’.
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