Part 32: 1985 continued.
In the back of an old pocket diary I have a list of all the gigs we have ever done. After each show I write the name of the venue and town and up until the late 80’s I would write the letter ‘e’ in a circle after a gig to show that we had been called back for an encore.
We’ve always thought that a crowd should really show that they want more before we return to the stage and consequently these e’s were pretty scarce in our early years. The first was actually after our fourth show when The Cure’s audience called us back on stage at Loughborough University. There is also one after the following gig at The phoenix club in Malvern but then there are thirty seven nights before we got another one. At a pub called The Vine in Stoke and then they become slightly more frequent.
We have always put a lot into our performances and I think I can safely say we are a good live band. We were good back then too but we were still a bit out of control and very intense. I sang every song as if my life depended on it and I suspect these displays of raw emotion made English audiences uncomfortable.
When we returned to ‘The Fulham Greyhound’, in April 1985, the crowd had grown and we were enthusiastically called back for more. For that night I decided I was going to change my style back to something more in line with the way I dressed when we first started. I cut my hair, brylcreemed it back and wore a Dogtooth check early 1960’s suit with a narrow suede tie. This was partly because I’ve always been interested in clothes and style and felt like a change, and partly to distance ourselves from the ‘Goth/Bat Cave’ scene which by now had really started to take off. The ‘Goth or Not’ question has followed us around for our entire existence and has never gone away.
I laughed a lot when David Bowie said he’d thought about ‘going Goth’ but discovered that a big part of being a Goth was denying that you were a Goth so quit the idea as it was too complicated.
And it is complicated - I think people have even written books about it.
Anyway, it was a successful show and as we were packing up and getting ready to drive home I asked Joanne from our record label what she thought about my ‘new look’. I remember her reply well, she said… in her kind but slightly sardonic way “yes… very cool Simon”… pause… “but I heard someone in the audience say to his friend that it was a shame the singer was dressed differently as the time before he looked really good, like a crazed, young, Lord Byron”.
Intrigued, and completely ignorant regarding any of the romantic poets and, in fact, poetry in general, I strayed away from the literature sections in the second hand book and junk shops I frequented and found a book called ‘BYRON: A portrait’ by Leslie A Marchand. And after that fascinating read decided he must have been one of the most extraordinary, brilliant, messed up, vain and annoying people who had ever lived. I also found that his poetry either went straight over my head or that the relentless rhyming irritated me so much as to make it unreadable. However, the imagery and story of his life and the world he lived in was truly absorbing and appealed to me.
In a shop opposite this book shop in Evesham, Justin and I discovered a section of antique clothes, including some very fine waistcoats and shirts. We were of an age and shape when pretty well anything we put on looked at least OK and Justin definitely looked better than OK in some of the things we tried on. No one else dressed this way at the time, so it felt like we were creating a style of our own. And we didn’t want this to be just a ‘band image’ where we dresses up for stage and photo sessions, we wanted to live the part and, within reason, wear these clothes all the time. I even went as far as buying an old pair of knee length riding boots.
The boots were an idea I’d got from Robin Dallaway who had become one of my closest friends. He, and The Shend, his co founder and singer of The Very Things cut an impressive figure when they walked into a pub. I’m taller than average but both were a good head taller than me, Robin in his dark, Italian cut suit, riding boots and short cropped peroxide hair and The Shend, who was built like a tank, must have touched seven foot, certainly in the punk days when he spiked his hair.
As bands ‘And Also The Trees’ and ‘The Very Things’ were very different, but we both had our own strong sense of identity and values. When Steven got back from touring with them he was very full of the experience and we were envious. We’d become quite demoralised by most English audiences, the British press and the music business in general and needed something new to open up for us. So Steven said he’d speak to their tour agent, ‘Days in Europe’, and ask if they would be interested in working with us. I wanted this to happen more than anything. We all did.
Meanwhile, I sat at my window at the top the house and Justin sat at his in the next room. People wrote to us and we wrote back, it gave us encouragement and writing about what we were doing helped us focus. Musical ideas were developing and taking shape and it felt as though we were on the edge of something, but often a great silence and stillness would descend on the hamlet and we would wonder what the hell we were doing there.
After some weeks had passed and some persuading from Steven, ‘Days in Europe’ agreed to meet us at a pub in Redditch whilst on a trip to visit ‘The Very Things’. It was an uncomfortable occasion for us with members of the two bands and the two women who ran the agency filling the small bar and no one knowing quite how to behave as it felt like something between a social gathering and a potential business meeting and succeeded as neither.
My brief mention of this much anticipated event in my pocket diary reads - “met ‘Days in Europe’ at The Cricketers. Horrible people…” and then there is a word I can’t decipher even under a magnifying glass but the word it most looks like is ‘Bollocks’.
If the meeting disappointed me it was nothing compared to how I felt when Steven told me that Minou, the tour manager from the agency, had told him that although she liked ‘And Also The Trees’ as a band musically, after meeting us personally she disliked the singer so much that she couldn’t possibly stand the idea of being on tour and in a tour bus together.
(Written by SHJ)