We consider the birth of ‘And also the trees’ to be our first live performance which was on January 12th 1980, our first year, was drawing to a close. We got a booking at The Phoenix club in Malvern,(see photo) in the upstairs room of a classic Victorian period spa town building, carrying all our gear, including our PA and spotlights up and down a winding staircase, then in December The Cure asked us to play at their special Christmas gig at the Notre Dame Hall in Leicester Square, London. I’m sure we had a good time but I don’t remember anything about this occasion, although I know that as well as The Cure and us, The Associates played.
It had been an exciting year, in two months we’d gone from playing to our friends in Inkberrow village hall to playing with The Cure in Leicester Square.
1981 was a year of extremes too, for the band and for me personally as my passage into the world of adulthood was far from smooth - in fact I was pretty messed up one way or another and Graham was even worse... but those stories are for another place and another time. We survived. Our little brothers who were still at school helped keep things together.
More than anything we wanted to play live and we managed to get some gigs together in pubs in the Midlands. One was in Coventry, I have no idea how or why we got booked at The Queen Inn but on April 25th we decided to hire a van and drive to Coventry at noon so we could hand out flyers in the town centre. Our type of music didn’t have a name or category so on the flyer we wrote ‘Psychedelic New Wave’ - which at the time seemed far less improbable than it does now.
Coventry is not a great looking place; it was a bitterly cold, grey afternoon with flurries of snow and at one moment we strayed into the middle of a race riot, bricks and bottles flying around and truncheon welding police. When opening time came around we went to the Queen Inn and set up our PA and equipment. It was quite a large back room in a pub that we later discovered no one drank at anymore.
Fifteen people came to the gig, most of them were our friends. I felt vulnerable standing up there on stage in that near empty room but I could lose myself in the music, we played it well and it felt good.
It might sound a bit grim, but it felt like we were on a journey and this was just a part of it so we weren’t disheartened. It was an experience. Our mindset at the time started with the question - ‘what the hell else would we have been doing?’. When you have spent your adolescence in the countryside your entertainment expectancy levels are set pretty low.
On the way home we stopped at a petrol station on a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere. I was dead tired and stood looking at this petrol station illuminated in the darkness with snow falling heavily now from the night sky and thought… I’m probably going to remember this.
The gigs that followed in venues like The Fighting Cocks in Birmingham and The Green Dragon in Stratford upon Avon where there were regular audiences were invaluable and more successful. We even got reviewed for the first time in a paper called ’Brum beat’. They described our music as “White man’s industrial blues’.