My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): Birth Of The Validators

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When I first started my epic journey on the highway of ROCK I travelled with a BAND, as most of us do, but I very soon got FRUSTRATED with the impositions of Collective ROCK. Not everybody thinks it's a good idea to do a gig in London on a Tuesday night when you have EXAMS on Wednesday morning, and some people seem to think it's LESS important to see Scratchwood Services than it is to see their CHILDREN, so after a few years of struggling with these issues, I decided to strike out on my own.

My first idea was to grow an extra pair of arms somehow, so I could play bass AND guitar along to a drum machine, but when I got up next morning I realised there were certain practical difficulties that would prevent this plan. For a start, I didn't actually know HOW to play guitar.

Over time, however, I learnt enough chords from The Complete Beatles Songbook and wrote enough songs USING them to have a gig-able SET, and began several JOYFUL years of playing solo. Playing gigs on your own is BRILLIANT - you only need to persuade YOURSELF that it's a good idea, you only need to get YOURSELF to gigs, and if it all goes well you get ALL the credit. On the other hand there's nobody else there to point out that certain gigs are NOT a good idea, you have to turn up all on your own, and if it all goes horrible wrong there's nobody to sit around with later on COMPLAINING about it with. Every so often this would all get TOO depressing and I'd try and get a band together.

The first attempt to do this was called "Mark's Electrical", named after a Hoover Shop I passed every day on the way to work. I asked two members of recently disbanded Leicester Legends The Marmite Sisters to be in the band with me, although the fact that they'd disbanded because none of them wanted to be in a band EVER AGAIN should have been a warning sign. Steve spent our one and only practice saying "I hate doing this, I don't want to play guitar, why did I turn up?" and Jabba HID from me in a pub round the corner. Jabba, by the way, wasn't his real name, it was one of those nicknames that get given to people but should never be used when they're around. It was such a jolly sounding, and fitting, name, however, that everybody always forgot this, and he spent much of his pub time looking ANNOYED. Big and cuddly, but ANNOYED.

Some years after this I decided to try again. Having released a couple of upbeat songs on Proper Vinyl I thought it was time to expand my ARTISTIC REPERTOIRE and release a BALLAD, and chose a song called "Born With The Century" from my extensive Home Taping back catalogue. I still really love that song, I reckon it's one of the best I've ever done, though a song about the ill treatment of the elderly in residential homes was perhaps NOT the ideal way to follow up two songs about getting drunk and going out.

I badgered Mr Frankie Machine into coming to Leicester to record it with me and asked Celebrity Drummer Mr Tim Pattison to join us. I'd been pals with Tim for years, since we both drank in the Pump & Tap and The Magazine, and he'd ended up being in my previous band The Council. He'd kept turning up to our gigs so we'd ask him to join, and unfortunately he'd said yes - unfortunate for us because it meant we'd lost half our audience, unfortunate for him because he now had to turn up to our gigs carrying a drum kit, rather than just his drinking wallet. He used his drinking wallet a LOT in The Council.

Anyway, we recorded the song and it came out sounding pretty good. I went round to Tim's house to give him a copy of the finished single a few weeks later and he said "That was good - we should record an album", and then shut the door, to avoid further debate. His was a very busy household in those days - not only was he an International Star Of Indie as a member of Prolapse ("the most important punks in the country" - Melody Maker) but his fiancee Emma was an International Knitwear Spy. On any given day he'd be going off on tour in America while she'd be jetting over to Cologne to case out the latest trends in scarves, it was all VERY glamorous, so when he told me we were going to be recording an album I was powerless to resist.

Over the next six months I got nearly everybody I knew and liked in BANDS to come and play with me, and together we recorded about 26 songs. I had a LOT of back catalogue to get recorded! I'd been worried that playing with Actual Musicians might mean that our SOUND would become to SLICK and LA PROFESSIONAL, so developed a system we called Verbal Eno Cards to counteract this. It was based on Brian Eno Oblique Strategy Cards, which he'd devised to help break through creative SLUMPS. In his system you took a card at random and followed what it said, sometimes something simple like "Take A Break", sometimes less so , like "Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency". I thought this was a BRILLIANT idea, so adapted it for our needs to DISTRACT everyone from playing too well. One song was done "with moustaches" whilst another was played "as if we're The Velvet Underground, but instead of being drug addicts and street poets they're a staff room of Comprehensive School teachers."

This worked SURPRISINGLY WELL, and the resulting recordings were anything BUT slick. OK, the fact that we rarely learnt any of the songs more than an hour before we recorded them might have helped, but it added to the sense of FUN that ran through all the sessions, also jollied along by the presence of The Durham Ox Singers on backing vocals. Once the recordings were finished it was clear that we had to whittle down to song count a bit, and we did this with the Focus Group Exercise. I made a tape of all the songs for everybody who'd played on the album and also for a select bunch of regulars from The Durham Ox. I gave them all Questionnaires that I'd devised, one which they GRADED each song, and a few weeks later I was able to feed all this DATA into a mighty database and thus ascertain which songs would be on the album.

If it sounds coldly cynical and automotive, please be reassured that most of the hard work was done shouting ridiculous abuse at each other over pints and pickled eggs, and that the final meeting to discuss running orders was endearingly shambolic. The core of the group met in a pub in Loughborough (halfway between Derby and Leicester) to discuss the final running order. It should have been a very businesslike meeting, if it were not for the presence of two unavoidable distractions - BEER and a Pub Quiz. By ten to eleven we'd come second in the pub quiz but hardly started the running order and also missed our last bus home. It was very swiftly sorted out while I was at the bar for last orders and Tim was ringing Emma to ask very nicely if she'd mind getting out of bed and driving over to pick us up.

We'd finished our first album and, by that time, we'd also become a gigging band... but that's another story!

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