None of the record companies we gave or sent packages to responded. Not even with a rejection letter. So I sat at my window and Justin sat at his and we looked out at the black, corrugated iron Dutch barn and Bone Orchard, the fields of Worcestershire and the Malvern hills beyond. Then we signed on the dole and started looking for work. It was demoralising but we were far from giving up hope. We rehearsed most days, tried to write some new songs, played headers and volleys in the yard, smoked a lot of cigarettes, drank tea and ate Hobnob biscuits.
In the evenings we went to The Old Bull in Inkberrow, an old black and white beamed pub on the village green with an open fire and a stone floor. We went late because we were always short of money but usually managed a pint or two before closing time. It was about a mile away so Justin and I often walked there, up our quiet lane which was very dark, to the top road called Pinhills which was haunted and also dark and quiet but it felt good to be out in the open, especially on the way back.
The people in the village called me Sid from the days when I was a punk, but my relationship with the locals had become distant and they’d stopped being so friendly with me, no doubt thinking I’d become a bit of a pretentious tosser, which on reflection was a fair call - although in my defence I think I was distancing myself not so much from them as from my past.
But some friends stuck and one guy who we called Stavros, although he looked about as much like Kojak’s brother as I looked like Sid Vicious, came in the bar one night and told us he’d half pressed the fast forward button on his car cassette player speeding up our original, painfully slow, version of ’Wallpaper dying’… and we should give it a try. We did and he was right - it sounded better at 4 times the speed.
There was another song we were working on around that time, following a piece Justin had come up with on his new 12 string acoustic guitar. It had a softer, more delicate sound than anything he’d written before and it took you to a different place. I’m not usually one to analyse or explain what my lyrics are about but looking back, these quite simplistic lyrics which are roughly about a supernatural sensitivity to nature, reflect my own, quite sudden, altered perception or re-discovery of nature and the surrounding countryside.
We eventually called this song ‘Shantell’, a name I came across on a gravestone surrounded by a mass of toys and cards with drawings on them while walking around a chapel just outside the small town of Astwood bank after I’d dropped Nick off for a driving lesson. My mind was full of music now, our music, and the sensation was still quite new to me. The need to find ideas for lyrics and develop them was a novelty too and something I wasn’t at all sure I was capable of.
In my childhood I had been sensitive and drawn to melancholia but I’d fought hard against it, I’d even managed to become ‘one of the lads’ but it was around this time that I suppose I started lowering my guard.
However, it was Justin’s guitar and Steven and Nick’s creative reaction to it that was the driving force of ‘And Also The Trees’, my rôle was to add another focal point that would hopefully compliment, but not dominate or ruin it.
The Malvern hills are visible from miles around. From our house their shape looked a bit like that of a woman lying on her side across the western horizon, marking the border of Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The town of Malvern is at the foot of the hills, it has an 11th Century priory at it’s centre and in Victorian times was a thriving spa town. There are great panoramic views across the county and despite being a bit run down it is one of the nicest places to live in the area. It’s where my mother was born and as I mentioned previously where we saw a lot of our favourite bands playing at the Winter Gardens. There was actually a record label based there too.
We’d never taken much notice of ’No Future Records’ as it was an ‘Oi Punk’ label putting out records by groups that we weren’t really into like ‘Peter and the test tube babies’, ‘The Screaming Dead’ and ‘The Violators’. Their best selling band was ‘Blitz’ who had a few very successful singles and an album that was one of the best of its genre. As a reaction to ‘Blitz’ changing their musical direction to something more in line with ‘New Order’, the label dropped the word ‘No’ and formed ‘Future Records’. When we discovered this we thought we might as well send them a copy of ‘From Under the Hill’.
To our surprise ‘Future records’ responded and asked if they could come and see us play live, so we invited them to our next concert which was at ‘The Dog and Trumpet’ in Coventry. All I remember about this occasion is two provocatively gesticulating members of the support act, which seemed to be a radical feminist branch of a local drama school, standing on stage singing what is apparently a well known music hall classic called ’Tits and Ass’ and the four of us giving each other sideways glances wondering if the people from the label were already in the audience.
After our performance two men and a woman came back stage, introduced themselves as ‘Future Records’ and made a mixture of comments that left us unsure wether they like us or not. One of them, a big bloke with a crew cut called Chris, criticised the way we dressed or how we behaved on stage… I forget exactly what it was, but whilst driving back home in the van we dwelt on this for a while and ended up writing him off as a jumped up twat and lying to ourselves by saying we didn’t give a damn what they thought about us anyway.
A few days later the phone rang and a voice said “hello, this is Chris Berry of Future records… we want to sign the band”.