I was very proud about being able to say that I was in an underground rock band. Along with saying ‘I play for Aston Villa football club’ which by now I had conceded was unlikely, it was about the coolest thing I could possibly think of. I didn’t want to be a rock star, there was something a bit brazen or overblown about all that in my opinion - I wanted to be in a band that normal people had never heard of.
However, the gloss of just being in a band was starting to wear thin - we wanted to release a record, which in 1982 meant you needed to be signed up by a record label. Deep down we were hoping to skip the tedious business of trying to attract record companies and sign to ‘Fiction records’ which I have no doubt Robert was doing his best to encourage, but it had become clear that the boss of ‘Fiction’, and The Cure’s manager, Chris Parry, didn’t like us.
For lack of any other options we turned to the music papers again and found an advertisement asking bands to send demo tapes to a company called ‘BPM records’ who described themselves as - ‘a pre-release system with direct links to record companies and management agencies’.
Our demo was accepted and we were invited to London for a meeting with the company manager… who turned out to be a bloke in a garden shed in North London. It wasn’t what we were expecting but he seemed to be serious; he showed us a typical record company contract (we were shocked at how one sided it was) and told us we needed a strong image and a photo on a white background so potential record companies could see what we looked like.
The plan of action was that we would record a cassette mini album which ‘BPM’ would manufacture. We would then buy the cassettes from him and sell them at gigs, through local record shops… any way we could think of. And finally, after a given period he would present our sales figures to his contacts in the music business. It was a bit like an 80’s equivalent of hoping to impress record labels by having thousands of ‘likes’ on My Space or Facebook. I don’t think we really believed this would lead to much but it seemed like a positive step.
We were well aware that a bands image was important, Justin and I had bought records by punk bands purely on the strength of what they looked like on the cover (with mixed results). We tended to avoid all New Romantic bands for the same reason. Clothes and style interested us and although we just carried on wearing random stuff we found in charity shops and kept a studied distance from what was considered ‘fashionable’, the thought of having our own look was appealing.
But our immediate task was to write some new songs and recording them. We were still very rough around the edges but the music came, not easily but slowly, like taming something wild sometimes or at others more like bringing life to something inert…. and at the heart of that ‘something’ was the guitar - that didn’t particularly want to sound like a guitar.
I still didn’t know what to write lyrics about. Nick was helpful - he wrote the outline of a song that we called ‘Midnight garden’ which was once or twice removed from the kind of confused angry-romantic-young-man angst I was caught up in.
I studied photographs that complimented the music and wrote about them, or I would instinctively reach out for a book. Once, ‘The Writings of John Ruskin’ came to hand. I flicked through it and saw a subheading: ’True and False Life of Man’, and those few words helped me write the lyrics for one of the most aggressive and powerful pieces of music the band had written - ‘Impulse of man’.
The first, or perhaps second time we played that song live was at the steepled church of St Mary’s in Worcester city as part of an event to save it from demolition. This performance remains as
one of our strangest on stage experiences as apart from a handful of friends the only people there were elderly women and middle-aged mothers rummaging through piles of old clothes on trestle tables and a group of small children who danced on the empty flagstone floor in front of us.
‘Impulse of man’ came to it’s sharp, climactic end and a long decay of reverb rolled around the cavernous interior and faded to silence. The women continued sorting though the mountains of coats and trousers and the children stopped their dancing and turned to look at us, up there on the alter, on the edge of the sublime and the ridiculous, the great arched window behind us.
Then Justin, who for reasons of his own had heat sealed a black bin liner over the body of his guitar, held it at an angle towards his speaker cab and started that eerie seagull like feedback; one gull at first, then another and another until the space beneath the huge vaulted ceiling seemed to be full of their cries… which were joined by a bass guitar note, a kick-drum and a rim shot and I looked around for the book to read the words that by now I probably knew, and saw a distant woman holding up a cardigan and the children start up their carefree dancing.