If you’re following the tale of the band (if so – why?) then we last left us in 1993 or something as a 3 piece without much of a clue about writing songs or playing music. It was around this time that we started proper “rehearsals.” Rehearsal is the dirty secret of musicians. All musicians want to look lank and interesting, like they’ve just left some kind of wild party and found themselves stood on stage holding a guitar thinking “whatthefuckever – let’s rock!” In fact, the truth is that they’ve carefully teased and primped themselves into looking that way and spent many, many hours polishing their stage act.
Rehearsals typically take place in a dingy, cold, low-ceilinged room where you can hear 14 other bands cacaphonously banging away in the adjacent rooms. If you’re lucky, there’ll also be a microphone which electrocutes your teeth if you get too close to it, and a list of Forbidden Activities pinned to the back of the door detailing lots of things that Some Band once did which the ownership has vowed will never happen again.
Our approach was different. We lost the use of our hallowed spot in the Foxes biscuit factory warehouse and took up residency in a local scout hut, which we could use for free on a Sunday morning. It was a vast echoing space, with plug sockets that dangled alarmingly from the wall and was covered in a thin scrim of ice pretty much all year round but it served our purpose.
As we played, we gradually began to construct things somehow. One week I might master the chords to a particular Suede song (more of which later!) or a Stone Roses riff. So we’d kind of fake our way through the song a bit. Our list of Songs We Can At Least Play The First Verse To read something like this:
- Sunshine of Your Love – Cream
- Strange Brew – Cream
- Fool’s Gold – Stone Roses
- Saw Her Standing There – The Beatles
These were terrifyingly ambitious songs for people who still couldn’t actually play at this point. Still, it kept us off the streets.
At this remove, I can’t actually say which song we really nailed first. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it might have been Saw Her Standing There, purely because I recall having a guitarist’s magazine that actually had all the notes written down so you could learn it. The same issue, weirdly, also gave me enough information to play Enter Sandman by Metallica, and Hangar 18 by Megadeth. Weirdly, for someone who was/is basically a pasty loser I actually learnt some of these tunes. Not weirdly, they didn’t make the set list.
God knows how long we fannied about in this draughty space, clanging away tunelessly, but it was around this time that I got a job working as a chip shop counter boy. To divert you from this lengthy and boring tale for a moment, here’s a Fact You Won’t Know:
If you work in a chippy wearing suede shoes, those shoes will smell exactly like spunk after a couple of weeks.
Now – where was I? Oh yes, emptying the slops out from the restaurant wearing a tabbard. Bizarrely, this led me to meet one Jonny Wilson, a slight, nervy lad who did Something Or Other at the back of restaurant. It turned out that he loved music and actually owned a guitar so it seemed pretty natural to ask him along to rehearsal… especially as it transpired he lived about 4 seconds from our rehearsal room.
Now: this introduced competition into the band. It was kind of MY band (on the basis of nothing at all) and here was someone else with a guitar. Even though I was teaching him the rudimentary bits and pieces of playing and songwriting that I’d managed to acquire, he still represented a major threat to my position as King Shit so gave me the kick up the arse I needed to start getting better. And miraculously, I did!
Within a few short months of painstaking arsing aimlessly about, we were approaching the stage where we could probably become a Live Band. Gulp.