We were a 4 -piece band; often there were more people on stage than in the audience
The drips from the ceiling probably should have alarmed us more than they did. The dingy rehearsal studio in Rotherhithe was, after all, below the Thames and also full of electrical equipment. This seemed like detail to us though.
There we were staring in awe at this 12-inch piece of plastic. Track 6 side 2 — our song. It was the first test pressing of an album that would see our little band achieve a dream, albeit a modest one. Back in the 80s everyone was doing local compilations in the spirit of the DIY ethic but that didn’t make the fact that we had a song on this one feel any less monumental. Maybe it’s weird (or sad) to ascribe such a feeling to a bit of plastic but of course it was much more than that to us.
Several weeks earlier we had all been standing in the loading bay of a disused warehouse somewhere in pre-gentrified Wapping posing for photos. It was cold and we were both awkward and unphotogenic but there was something sort of exciting about it; this after all is what bands do. When the final albums were delivered however, they were minus photos. On enquiring why, the bloke running the project told us that the negatives had been eaten by his dog. This was a low budget enterprise.
You always remember your first time though. In fact, the dream of releasing a record was of course preceded by the dream of being in a studio. For us, this was also a first. We had been advised to choose the song that we knew best because the studio was unforgiving in recognising and magnifying every mistake. We proved the truth of this and we had plenty to be revealed (how times have changed with modern digital tech.) By the end though we had our song — our 3 and a bit minute lifetime (so far) ambition.
That song on that record was to be our highlight (unless you count an inexplicable ‘song of the week’ recognition in a local fanzine for our cover of The Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ — it was actually very average but played to audiences that were actually very drunk.) By 1982 the band was no more but we had that record and bizarrely so do others as it still changes hands for £50+ to collectors of 80s obscurities.
Rewind
Being in a studio let alone making a record was a far-off dream just a couple of years before. At 17, having borrowed some money from my long-suffering parents (to be repaid from my first dead end job), I had bought a cheap drum kit and attempted to form my first band. To those who quibble that there’s something wrong with this chronology — shouldn’t it be learn to play then buy instrument then form band? — I can only say that this was post punk and such a rigid structure was considered prehistoric.
Actually ‘band’ is not quite accurate here. There were just two of us — a line up based less on a long before its time White-Stripes-approach to bared back visceral rawness and more by a lack of anyone else we could find to join us. We had rather unwisely swallowed the punk myth of ‘two chords and you have a band’ — it was at least mythical in the sense of a band that’s any good. We weren’t.
For me therefore it was a short but significant step to shortly later joining a band of four and, within it, to take my first steps on stage. The stage was not very rock’n’roll — a village hall in rural Kent — but we did our best to address that by a mixture of volume and effects. Unfortunately both went a bit far. Hiring a strobe light seemed like a good idea at the time but we hadn’t quite thought through its impact in a small space so when people later told me that they had been forced to leave the hall to throw up on the grass outside I was a bit surprised. They weren’t lonely out there though because a number of others had left to escape the skull crushing volume of turning up the amps to, er, eleven.
In fact the gig nearly hadn’t happened at all. That night was my first experience of the phenomenon that says ‘the more gregarious and outspoken a person in a rehearsal room, the more terrified they can be on — or nearing — a stage’. As they stood with guitars strapped around their neck, the realisation that they couldn’t go on forced a sudden about turn — leaving those behind slammed in the face with a guitar neck. Keystone cops but painful.
We made it on in the end though. Unfortunately it was only then that everyone realised — despite the volume and the lights and the T-shirts we’d made — we had no songs and couldn’t play. There were people there that night who understandably have never spoken to me again. Good decision.
Fast Forward
The early 90s were pre-Brit Pop and mid/late Grunge. I was in the last throes of my 20s and crossing the ‘big three 0’ barrier whilst wondering if this band thing still made any sense.
At the best of times though it definitely did. By now I was in a band that had songs, could play and had no flaky characters. We wrote about proper subjects (what was going on in the country and in real lives) whilst playing them with directness and honesty. And in return audiences either hated us or ignored us.
We suffered a one-word fanzine review — ‘pitiful.’ The writer must have been very proud of their pithy eloquence.
Competing in a Battle-of-the-Bands one night illustrated the hostility; being ignored might just have been preferable. As we began our set, a group in the audience started to barrack. I couldn’t see clearly who they were but it was obvious that they were crusties — dishevelled and hairy, their taste obviously wasn’t for our 4-minute indie guitar songs. As we piled on, the heckling got worse (the words ‘you’re shit’ were heard) and I realised that these people weren’t in fact from the audience but were a band that had preceded us that night. Their set consisted of them punching their instruments whilst yelling. There were no songs; tunes were obviously redundant since theirs was a protest — a sort of anti-music aimed at anti ‘normal.’ That was fair enough — it’s a free country — and the audience let them do their thing. Now though they weren’t prepared to let us do ours.
Bands often say that they like to break down the barrier between stage and audience but I doubt that what they had in mind was what happened next. One of the hecklers jumped up on stage and tried to grab our singer’s mic in order to make their observations face to face. It was becoming clear that we needed to stop this but that throwing punches would not be the best way to do it — and would almost certainly scupper any chances that we had in the competition as well as any chances of being booked again. It was a quandary then. Our singer however — in an act that remains heroic in my eyes — came up with a solution. I hadn’t realised that the onstage crusty was a woman. Our singer had though and so came up with the one thing that would both shut her up AND disgust her — he snogged her. It worked.
By that stage we were very late into the set and though the heckling reduced I felt that it had gone on for too long and my patience snapped. As we ended the penultimate song, I stood up and said enough, refused to play the final song and started to dismantle my kit. Our bass player — a reasonable and generally mild-mannered man — lost his temper and accused me of letting them win. He was right; I was wrong. By then though things had gone too far. It seemed a low point of band life and a good argument for calling it a day once and for all.
Later, as I was unloading my drumkit and carrying it up two flights of stairs to my flat in the early hours of the morning in deserted streets, a car pulled up beside me. It took me a while to realise that it was our guitarist. He had some news. We had won! It seemed that the audience had seen or heard something through the chaos. Surreal.
Whilst that gig was a (thankfully rare) example of aggression, what we mostly saw was indifference. It was that that really resulted in our split (I’d also personally decided that this would be my last band.) Several weeks after that decision however, in a strange twist of fate, we learned that we had qualified for the regional final of a national Battle-of-the-Bands sponsored by Dr Martens and to be held at the East Wing of the Brighton Centre. This was a venue on a different level to anything we had played before (I’d recently seen a very young Radiohead there) so we decided to postpone our disbandment until after this gig. Maybe somewhere in the back of our minds was the hope that someone was listening (after all we’d qualified from several hundred demos submitted.) Musicians are often perennial dreamers.
The dream didn’t last long. The bands we were up against seemed to share a love for the melodramatic — one even employing dry ice. This extended to absurdly theatrical crescendos at the end of songs and even introductions of the band members in a 20 minute set. Maybe they thought they were at Wembley. All of this was anathema to us. We played our songs giving it all we had, said what we had to say and then shut up. When the chord faded on the last song I leant into the mic and said ‘cheers’ knowing that it would be the last word I’d say form a stage. It was.
When the results were announced we came last. A few people said to us afterwards that this was ridiculous as we were the best band there but ‘best’ is clearly a matter of opinion. We were swimming against that tide; what I believed in in music was out of step. All we could do was to do our thing and to be proud of it. That was good enough. It still is.
