We started 1984 with some gigs in Birmingham. Since then the centre of town has been redeveloped and now feels like a vibrant, modern city, but when we were playing there it was still suffering from some horrendous 1960’s urban planning decisions and was on the whole a rough, charmless, place.
One of the shows was in the upstairs room of a pub called ‘The Golden Eagle’. Some lads we knew in a Psycobilly band called ‘The Crypt Kicker 5’ supported and between us we packed the place out. The threatening to jocular balance of the Pschobillies combined with our own unusual qualities made for an interesting mixture and it had been a good evening up to the point when the landlord, a hefty middle aged man in a suit, flanked by two very large, menacingly relaxed looking human beings, approached us in the carpark and gave us a small, plastic, bank bag with a one pound note in it.
Anticipating our surprise and disappointment he added that the mens toilets had been vandalised and he’d subtracted the estimated cost of the repairs from our fee. Outraged and furious at the injustice of this, we stood at the top of Hill street, the old, Victorian post office looming in the darkness and the marvellously ostentatious, columned, town hall across the road behind us, looked at him and his companions and carried on loading the van.
But we liked Birmingham and continued playing there whenever we could. In March we supported ‘The Armoury show’ at ‘The Tin Can club’ , an ex strip club that still had a tired, glitzy look about it and a strangely agreeable, sleazy, atmosphere.
Before the show we went to a nearby pub for a pint with their guitarist John McGeoch who we’d met before and admired for his playing with ‘Magazine’ and then ‘Siouxsie and the Banshees’. He was always friendly and supportive and when we showed him the cover of ’Shantell’ he said it looked “brolliant” which was a good compliment coming from someone who knew about art and design.
After our performance Richard Jobson swung past us and said “great vocals!”. So unaccustomed to being complimented on my singing I had to look around and check he wasn’t talking to someone else. All in all it was a very uplifting experience.
The boost in confidence it gave me quickly disappeared when I discovered a terrible review of the gig in the NME or Sounds. Focusing his derision on me alone the journalist gave me the worst mauling I am ever aware of having in the press for, amongst other scathing observations, “writhing around on the floor of the stage in leather jeans….. “
I felt wretched because there was no mention of our music in the review at all, so the band as a whole was being ridiculed for my misguided behaviour. My ego had taken a beating and I wanted to kill the journalist but much, much later I realised he was right. In fact he was doing me a favour as it helped me take a step towards finding myself rather than losing myself in the fantasy of being someone else. It took me a long time to get over that review and even longer to get over Jim Morrison.
The most important thing for us though, at that point, was getting a John Peel session. We weren’t aware of him before punk but then in 1977 we discovered that he played punk rock on his show which no one else did so we started listening. What amazed us at the time was that he was almost 40 years old… an old bloke, and he not only liked the same music as we did, he was introducing us to a whole lot more. We listened to at least part of his show most nights for years and felt quite close to him.
Apart from the thrill of being played on the radio and on his show, we wanted a session because it was clear to us that you rarely saw a record in the indie charts by a band that he hadn’t been playing and given a session to. It was like the first link in a chain that could lead to better things. I never met him but he seemed to be a pretty humble man and wouldn’t have really wanted to be that important to so many bands. But he was.
After the Birmingham shows we played in the basement of The Clarendon Ballroom in London, an important moment for us as it was our first headline show in the capital. We would play there again a number of times, hiring a transit van from our local garage and driving down on the afternoon of the gig to Hammersmith Broadway where the club was situated in a seething mass of traffic and noise which would still be in full swing when we packed up and make our way home after the show.
The motorway took us as far as Oxford, then after that all was quiet as we passed through the sleeping villages of the Cotswolds and into the darkness of the countryside. We crossed the Avon over a bridge by a pub called The Swan at Bidford, skirted the orchards of the Vale of Evesham and then eventually down Morton under Hill lane to our house where at two or three in the morning we’d haul our heavy gear and colonial trunks up the rickety stairs to our room in The Dairy. They were good gigs and each time more people came… young, curious, music lovers who watched intently and responded with cautious applause.
On March 30th we played at Stafford College in the North Midlands. When Chris and Joanne from our record company arrived they told us the BBC had been in touch and had invited us to record a John Peel session.
(Written by SHJ)