When you form a band with your friends, it can lead to problems. Firstly, despite all that backs-against-the-wall romantic camaraderie associated with gangs of teenage boys, you’re actually probably a little bit competitive. Secondly, it is *very* difficult to breach discussions about ‘musical differences’ because, well, you’re friends.
Sometime in around 1992, we’d managed to cobble together a rough line up for the band. We had a drummer (Brendan: owned drums) a singer (Bez: couldn’t sing) a guitarist (Me: owned a guitar) and another guitarist (Leigh: didn’t own a guitar). Can you see the first point of tension there? One guitar into 2 doesn’t go. That meant that one of us would have to step down and play bass – distinctly unglamourous work… and hell, we were nothing if not fucking glamourous.
Secondly, I was a tiny bit obsessive about getting things right whereas Leigh wasn’t. I sat for hours by the stereo, painstakingly piecing together the right chords and riffs for some of the songs we wanted to play (the idea of writing our own was a million miles away at this time). Leigh didn’t. He would much rather that I show him the guitar parts.
That chafed with my sincerely held belief that I was ace. We also had very different approaches to things. I would try to impose the structure on something, where Leigh would be more freeform in his approach. He also had enormous impatience – wanting to get straight to the finished product somehow without the whole ‘learning all the bits’ stage. He also had an erratic sense of time. Most popular music – certainly the stuff we were interested in – runs along a timescheme of four. Next time you’re listening to Timbaland or Kanye or whatever dogshit you kids are listening to these days, try to count along – you’ll find that 4 fits very nicely in almost all cases.
Leigh however had the same erratic sense of timekeeping that made someone like John Lennon interesting (his songs were always dropping beats or adding ones) but difficult to keep up with unless you’re a crack musician. Unfortunately, this left him prone to adding those extraneous notes into songs where there wasn’t room for them. If the song you’re playing has a riff consisting of 12 notes, it’s pretty hard if the guitarist keeps playing 13. Or 11. Or sometimes both. It’s an art that is acquired through practice, and one that Leigh’s energetic mind wasn’t really cut out for.
So tension, unspoken, began to bubble under a little bit. I knew that Brend was getting pissed off with trying to play the drums (which have to be in time) when the music was nothing like in time. And I knew that I was getting pissed off learning the songs and then spending our rehearsal time teaching them to Leigh so that he could play my guitar while I sat uselessly on the sidelines listening.
One day, I manfully faced up to him and told him to shape his act up. I told him in no uncertain terms that I wanted the band to be a tight unit and we couldn’t carry any passengers. I had a single-minded resolve to knock Northside from their lofty perch in the charts and to that end I needed him to get out of the band.
Actually, I shouted at him one day because he bought me a Dime bar. Having specifically asked that he fetch something from the shop without nuts, he turned up with the legendary Dime bar and I hit the roof.
In case you think that’s gay and pathetic, I point my the people here assembled to legitimate rock precedent. During the recording of the Beatles’ Let It Be, Yoko Ono was brought into the studio by Lennon. She sat on a cushion, mewling a lot and adding to the enormous internal strife the band were already under. McCartney, Harrison and Starr simmered quietly as the weeks turned into months and their artistic endeavours were undermined by this sinister oriental interloper. Eventially Harrison broke ranks to confront Ono and Lennon. The straw that broke the camel’s back? She took one of his chocolate digestives without asking!
If that doesn’t give you an insight into the weird mixture of vanity and crapness that characterises the musician, then please leave now.
Anyway, our row over the Dime bar was, of course, nothing to do with confectionary. In a display of cowardice I was to display over many succeeding years I had spectacularly failed to confront a problem openly.
Much to my relief however, on this occasion it worked. Somehow Leigh saw through my complex metaphor and started to not show up for rehearsals. As his nearest ally in the band was our “singer” he too began to drift away. Fortunately, around this time we found ourselves a bassist and could thus legimately proceed as a three piece… enter Fryer!