My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): 29/6/01 - The Charlotte, Leicester

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Some people may consider my approach to ROCK to be a bit NAIVE, a bit DAFT and a bit HOPEFUL. I would probably agree with them - it's all well and good being COOL and CYNICAL and SNEERY about it all, but it isn't really a whole lot of fun, and if you're not going to enjoy the LUDICROUS aspects of This Krazy Circus Show, you're going to find yourself not enjoying ANY of it.

HAPPILY I am not the only one who goes running PELL MELL into the waves of ROCK hoping to learn to swim as he goes. Another Constantly Hopeful DOYENNE of this MILLEUE is Sorted Supremo Dave Dixey, who used to build up MASSIVE levels of OPTIMISM for every single he released. INDEED, when I used to drink in his pub many a night would be spent hearing of his plans for, say, the next Dalmatian Rex record, and how THIS would be the one to break through into daytime radio, and what he'd got planned for when they were on telly and, by the end of the evening, we would have to PHYSICALLY RESTRAIN him from ringing up the manufacturing plant and ordering an extra THOUSAND copies, before the first 500 had even been delivered. Nearly every time he'd end up with about 200 of them still under his kitchen sink, but he'd still get FIRED UP with the same enthusiasm for the next time.

My favourite story of Dave's LURID ENTHUSIASM, was when he decided to have a tidy up of all those records beneath the kitchen sink and found a STASH of 7 Inches from the first record he ever released, in 1980. It was the only non-cassette release by an punk band from Bournemouth and in this country was extraordinarily obscure. However, for YEARS Dave had been telling us that these singles were selling for a FORTUNE to Punk collectors in Japan. The box he found had no sleeves, but if he gradually LEAKED them onto the market he could have made a FORTUNE.

Instead of that he got all excited and decided that he's RE-RELEASE it... by photocopying some new sleeves and selling them at a FRACTION of the collector's market price. I don't think he even mentioned that this "new pressing" actually contained the ORIGINAL singles, and I don't know if anybody realises now, but he flogged THE LOT at about a tenth of the price he could have got, just because he got a bit excited about finding them. I think that's GRATE!

Another example of this sort of thing was the Havock Junction album, which came about due to ANOTHER rifle through the massive piles of unsold records (and, by the way, please don't think I'm pointing at DAVE'S PILES as if they're something unusual. Really, they're not - mine are MASSIVE). He thought that if he put out a NEW album featuring tracks by loads of the bands he'd released before, and sold it at a BARGAIN PRICE, then loads of people would snap it up, become INTRIGUED, and buy up the back catalogue. BRILLIANT!

Of course, it didn't happen that way - Dave is the sort of person who is MAGNETICALLY ATTRACTED to the "Various Artists" section in the dark corner of Indie Record Shops and LOVES skiffling through to see if there's anything cheap and/or interesting, but sadly a) most people don't bother and b) even if they did, the "Various Artists" section in Indie Record Shops is ALREADY full of CDs nobody wants, so they don't tend to order new ones. THUS the GRATE plan to shift piles of back catalogue became another pile under the kitchen sink.

We didn't know that at the time (although many of us had a sneaky HUNCH), and so we gathered at The Charlotte for the official ALBUM LAUNCH GIG! I've not been to many Album Launch gigs, largely because the first one I ever went to would be hard to BEAT. It was for the second Prolapse album, and a LOAD of us piled on to the train from Leicester to London to join in the fun.

We EXPECTED celebrities, free booze, and KRAZY TIMES.

We GOT The Drummer From Salad, one crate of beer which had been drunk by the time we got there, and a DO so lacklustre (they didn't even play the album, let alone do a gig) that everyone, including the band, went to the pub next door instead. It was so dreary it got MENTIONED as such in the NME! We DID have KRAZY TIMES - we played PLATFORM CHICKEN (every time the train stops you LEAP off and run down to the other end. ZANY!) all the way home.

Anyway, the Havock Junction Launch was pretty much the same, except there were NO members of forgotten BritPop Conference Leaguers but there WAS a gig. The only audience for it was an INCREDIBLY drunk man who appeared to have wandered into The Charlotte by mistake and who didn't quite understand the concept of a GIG. All through my bit he stood right at the front of the stage and tried to have a CHAT. "All right?" he'd ask, "What are you up to then?" "Er... doing a gig?" He was very friendly, but wouldn't leave me alone, asking questions during songs as if I were just telling him the stories and looking slightly confused that the choruses weren't an answer.

Afterwards Dave was a bit disappointed at the low turnout and the fact that nobody had bought a CD (as everyone there apart from Incredibly Drunk Guy was ON it) but still, a few weeks later, he was BACK on the trail of ROCK. He's still at it today, with a NEW Dalmatian Rex single. Maybe THIS one will be the HIT!

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