There are two million ways to tell this story: through the music, the social arrangements, politically, artistically, subjectively. Certainly every member of the group would have a very different version. I'll just try to give some bones, some significant events, a little background and say, now and then, how, I felt about some of it.
Memory is treacherous, so I write this referring as much as possible to contemporary documents and notes. Most what follows is adapted loosely from something I wrote for Andy Ortmann soon after the band broke up.
Which explains why the style is sometimes a little odd. Henry Cow was first and foremost a performing group; none of the records we released got near to what we were like on stage, and of course, there is a mass of music that we never even tried to record. To a limited degree this has been ameliorated recently by the double box collection of previously unreleased materials: 9 Cds and one DVD of live recordings, radio recordings and studio recordings. For the bulk of our touring life, there were as many women in the band as men - road crew as well as performers.
Henry Cow was a full time project and we pretty much lived on top of each other for about 5 years, either on tour or rehearsing. We lived frugally - all the money we earned went into a kitty to pay for equipment, vehicles, repairs, and travel. The band fed us - that was my job along with with Maggie Thomas, who came on most of the tours with us and ended up being our sound engineer. John's wife Sarah was also our sound engineer for a long time, and their tiny son Ben travelled with us often, as did Dagmar and Anthony's son Max.
The group was run through a combination of formal, minuted, weekly meetings - and assigned personal zones of responsibility - for the accounts, catering, route planning, administration, maintenance, and so on. We wound up in a lot of bizarre places and did some things which, looking back, might appear extremely eccentric - noble - ridiculous - stupid - idealistic, but which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.
