Scott Conway cut his teeth as part of mid-sixties bubble-gum beat outfit, The Doilies. After a string of minor hits, he soon tired of the facile pop they were peddling and quit the band. Lashing out at his teenage fans, both metaphorically and, in one shameful incident, literally, Conway signed a solo deal with a view to taking his music in a more creatively experimental and artistically self-indulgent direction.

His debut album, ‘Conway 1’, was released in 1968, it’s title setting out its stall from the off. This was to be a rebirth, ground zero; an attempt to erase the past and start again. It wasn’t until his third release that the world saw the extent of his ambition, a startlingly avant-garde collection of, as Conway called them, ‘pieces’. Disapproving of the word ‘song’, he used the term ‘pieces’ throughout his career, referring to the shorter ones as ‘bits’.

His need to push boundaries was not always, if ever, well received. Even those in the studio at the time found it challenging. Ex-Spadeoak drummer Dave Toad worked with Conway on the albums ‘3’, ‘4’ and ‘5’ but left the sessions during the recording of ‘6’, when Conway’s experiments with food became too much.

“He had me sit at the kit for seven hours, tapping a slab of nougat with a breadstick. I don’t think we even used it in the end.”

The final mix of ‘Conway 6’ was rejected by the record company, who claimed that the album’s lack of bottom-end rendered it virtually unlistenable. As bassist Rob Clegg recounts,

“He came up with this idea of recording the bass parts but then not actually using them. He said, ‘let’s use the silence instead’. Of course, I went along with it… I just presumed he knew what he was doing.”

During preparations for his next project, fears began to grow for Conway’s mental state. His idea was to make a record with absolutely no trace of his presence. He discussed this vision with manager, Jonty LeFroy,

“He became obsessed by it. He wanted to remove all of his creative fingerprints from the record. He was after a kind of zen thing, I guess… a purity. He wanted to make a record that he had absolutely nothing to do with. Someone else would write it, someone else would perform it, sing it, produce it. Do all the artwork. He wouldn’t even hear it or see it. Ever. He genuinely believed that was something you could actually do. It was a difficult time”.

After a period of artistic and critical catastrophe, Conway withdrew, becoming a virtual recluse in his South Oxfordshire semi. Feeling that his seclusion wasn’t getting the publicity it deserved, he re-surfaced in the 80’s with a theatre project,  ‘Christie’s Rink’, an ill-fated ice-dance musical based on the Rillington Place murders. Of the projects inevitable collapse, Conway said, “you just can’t rely on people anymore. The money was there but the promoters pulled the plug as soon as Robin Cousins backed out”.

Disillusioned with more or less everything, Conway turned his back on music and to this day remains a mysterious and reclusive figure, occasionally seen in and around the quiet streets of Wallingford.

Darkness consumes, the space and the hole.
Emptiness dancing is dressed as a kiss.
The ghost of your spirit,
Haunting my kitchen
I dream of a knife-edge, my mixer tap drips

(chorus)
Cry out! Apollo!
Slap the meat from my hands
Howl at my porch-light,
Creature of utility,
Use my futility,
Sweet loser of the lost.

from ‘Loser Of The Lost’, Conway

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