My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): 3/10/01 - The Victoria Inn, Derby

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You may have noticed something of a PATTERN emerging recently in these articles, with other bands being awful, taking ages to soundcheck, and then nobody coming to the gig. It didn't ALWAYS go that way - on many occasions we'd play with DELIGHTFUL people who we would go on to become GRATE PALS with, have a marvellous evening in front of a large well-fed audience and go home full of nice beer and happy thoughts.

This wasn't one of those evenings. For a start it was at The Vic, a lovely pub for which I have GRATE affection BUT one where the beer will turn you inside out SO violently next morning you will find broken teeth in the toilet basin. My suspicions should have been raised by the way they'd pour your pint out of a big jug, rather than from the pump, and then disappear into the back to get some more. I ENVISION a gigantic BEER BEAST, OOZING Dodgy Bass out of its pores - mostly because that's exactly what I'd always turn into next morning.

The other band were ALREADY soundchecking when we arrived and continued to do so for over NINETY MINUTES! They were one of those "Hot" Bands who always crop up about in the wake of A New Exciting Band who have suddenly "broken through" when witless frightened A&R men sign anyone who sounds vaguely similar. The "Hot" Band is always suspiciously OLDER than the New Exciting one, so are BITTER that it's taken so long but CONVINCED their rightful time has come at LAST, and are always surprised when, after a year of being "styled", they release a dodgy rip-off of something that was fleetingly fashionable 18 months ago and are roundly ignored for about a week before being unceremoniously dumped, left only with a massive clothing bill and a happy memory of being nodded at by the bloke from Bush once in the toilets at Koko.

That's pretty much exactly what would happen to this particular bunch, but at the time of the gig they were at the very PEAK of their World Conquering Arrogance, having just had their one and only play on daytime Radio One. We could only watch AGHAST as they played song after song, occasionally stopping to ask the poor old sound man if he could "make the vocal monitor sound a bit more crisp." This was The Vic, where there WAS no specific vocal monitor, there was just some black boxes at the front, mostly for decoration, which could in an emergency be made to go "WUMPH" but, in their minds, they were ALREADY at Wembley.

By the time they'd finished soundchecking it was past the time when we were due to finish PLAYING, but happily our audience was unaffected by this rescheduling. This was probably because they both lived in the same house, and didn't need to get home for a while. We played our entire set to two people, Moo and Anne-Marie, who seemed to quite like it and didn't mind that we cut it a bit short so we could go back to our drinks.

Afterwards we sat around and had a HIGHLY enjoyable and - amazingly - PRODUCTIVE band meeting. They're usually one or the other and, if in a pub, almost always the former, but this time we decided that YES, we WOULD release another single soon, especially as it had got a 100% positive response from the audience that night.

As the evening progressed we'd occasionally look in on the other band in the gig room - not out of interest, but because that was how you got to the toilet. Over the course of an hour they played with all their professional ability, ROCKING OUT, dealing extended guitar WORKOUTS hither and thither and introducing every song as EITHER "our new single" or "a new one". And ALL of it, with the exception of bladder heavy Validators, to ABSOLUTELY NOBODY.

I take no pleasure at all from that. Well, almost none.

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