A band isn’t much cop with only one person in it. That makes you Jack Johnson, and headed for the door marked ‘exit.’ So, picture me, crouched by my hi-fi in 1989 listening to a copied tape of the Stone Roses album (it’s true – I helped kill music) on my Jack Jones (a close call there!) with my mum’s small guitar, trying to fathom out how the fuck to translate what I was hearing onto 6 nylon strings.
I lack a lot of things at this moment. Most tellingly even the most rudimentary grasp of the musical form, but – more crucially in terms of actually getting somewhere – other people to do the other stuff like the drums and bass or potentially keyboards and perhaps the nose flute for all I fucking know.
What I do have though is friends. Your mates at that age tend to coalesce around shared taste in music or, just as likely, cave in to the same peer pressures as everyone else so starting a band with them is the easiest option. Firstly, you’re all friends. Secondly, you all like the same music. Thirdly, none of you know fuck all about music. Fourthly, none of you own an instrument. Fifthly, you smell like teenage boys. Sixthly, none of you own an instrument. Seventhly, none of you know fuck all about music.
It can’t fail!
So unpromising were those early days that I recall vividly sat with my friend James Burton (this is his only appearance in this story, so enjoy it while it lasts) leafing through an Argos catalogue working out how many paper rounds we’d have to do in order to be able to afford a keyboard. The reasoning was simple: keyboards had beats preprogrammed into them (which you could speed up or down at a twirl of a dial) and there were a bank of buttons saying “guitar (electric”)… “guitar (classical)”… “organ (church)”… “oceanic sparkle”. With all that at your command you wouldn’t even need a band – just press the buttons and away you’d go!
Eventually, watching bands turning up on Top of the Pops every week must have delivered the first immutable law of rock into our sub cortices: Only Clever But Gay Disco Bands Are Comprised Of A Singer And A Keyboardist and we began to realise that we needed to divvy up musical responsibilities more effectively.
Enter Brend. Brend was a mate of mine I’d known since I was yay high – since junior school at least, probably play school before that, and very probably the womb before even that. Brend came with advantages. Firstly, he actually played music. Not cool music or anything, but he played a cornet in a brass band and therefore was clearly someone in the know. Secondly, he (sorry to Brendan’s mum!) had a garage. Thirdly – and most importantly – he had an Older Brother who had Smiths records and his own guitars, which he could actually play (see the second Immutable Law of Rock). Proximity to such an individual could only rub off on us magically, surely?
At this point in his life, he was dead, dead quiet, to the point of actual deadness. He was possessed of the world’s smallest and weirdest collection of books:
- Combat Frogmen
- Funghi or Britain and Europe
- Footballing Yearbook: 1977
And a music collection of similar brevity and striking oddness:
- Radio One: Jimi Hendrix (vinyl)
- Red Hot Drop Shot: Queen Bee (12″ vinyl single, and so obscure I don’t even know if this was the title)
- Brother in Arms: Dire Straits (the first CD I ever encountered!)
- Greatest Hits: Depeche Mode (tape?)
I have literally no idea what commonality holds all that together, but from tiny acorns grow ineffective indie bands, as the saying has it. I also have literally no idea how it was that, somewhere around this time, he acquired a drum kit and therefore became the First Proper Musician In The Band.
You notice I’m still bandying around the phrase “The Band” here, as if there actually was a band. One of the most crucial parts to being a band is actually believing that you are a band – even if you’re not. You have to tell people you’re in a band for one thing, or the whole point of it is lost and you’ll never get that shag you promised yourself.
“The Band” though was still purely notional. Brend had some drums and I had my vision of buying a keyboard with my pocket money (I’d still be saving now) but that was it. But with this idea in the air a few other people drifted in and out of this infinitesimal scene. I, for example, briefly joined someone else’s band – the magnificently title “Gregarious Escalators.” Taking their cue from the Inspiral Carpets Book of Choosing Two Unconnected Words As a Band Name, and the Northside Book of Using Drug Slang In The Place of Actual Lyrics, David ‘Bez’ Berry and Danny Wilson had scribbled down the lyrics to a song called ‘Flying’ and had a rudimentary tune to which it could be sung:
“Flying in the air,
Like I don’t have a care,
I look down and stare,
At all the people there,”
Or some such scheme. I have no idea what my role in the band was. I dimly remember turning up in Bez’s bedroom with my toy guitar so my best guess is that I was probably “lead guitarist”. I could still be lead guitarist, because I don’t think we ever issued a press release announcing our break up.
Bez, however, was a useful conduit to other things. For one thing, he had records by bands that no-one before or since has ever heard of. With hindsight, this suggests of course that he must have been reading the NME, but at the time it merely suggested that he’d been beamed in from Planet Cool. He was the only person I knew that had a Moonflowers record, for example. It came on vinyl, and instead of a B-side had aboroginal style carvings etched into the surface. I remember that the title was “Warpig” but I’ve never looked into it after that. I think they were dirty, fucking hippies. At the time, the charts were being punctuated by bands like the Stone Roses, Charlatans – even The High managed a brief stint in the top 20 around this time – but he had obscurer tastes. The World of Twist, Paris Angels and a host of other half-forgotten musical flotsam. On top of that he smoked dope.
All of this made him ideal fodder to be a singer.
You’ll notice that that list of attributes doesn’t include ‘the ability to sing’. In keeping with the Amateur Hour ethos of the times, it geniunely seemed not to matter that he was rarely within an octave of the note he was supposed to be hitting. He had Cool Records, drugs and a bowl haircut. Search over.
As the first formation of our merry troupe of troubadours began to crystallise I purchased my first guitar and our faltering journey began in much the same way it would continue for another 15 years (and counting!)