My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): 24/5/98 - The Point, Oxford

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It's always a bit weird watching old telly these days - like, if (for the sake of argument) you're onto season three of Magnum on DVD and he's wandering how on earth to find out whether the wealthy heiress really is a former fiancee of Robin Masters or actually a Soviet Spy it's hard to understand why he doesn't just google her. Similarly - come on Thomas, don't waste time trying to fix TC's helicopter so you can get over and save Rick from the burning Casino, just ring Higgins on your mobile and get HIM to do it. No WONDER you're always so short of cash, you loveable goon you!

Because, strange as it may seem to us here in the FUTURE, there was a time when life wasn't quite as super-whizzy and fantastic as it is now. Back in the late nineties we were on the cusp of the change, with the interweb just starting to make an impact on our lives. For me the first big thing was email lists - these are dying out now, but at the start of the interweb (by which I mean the interweb, not the ethanet - BACK, YOU GEEKS!) they were a BIG DEAL. You laboriously trekked through the approximately 200 pages that existed on the web at that time until you found a list of mail servers and what lists they maintained. Once you'd chosen the right one for you you sent them an email, and soon you were receiving around 10 messages a day from other enthusiasts. I first joined the blur mailing list, advert-l, and rather alarmingly found myself in discussion with very intense teenage girls with lecturer Dads who let them use their home access to University computer systems to cyber-dribble over Alex James. I then briefly moved on to the Billy Bragg list, but was chucked off for getting into an argument with an American "Communist" who would not believe that ANYBODY on the planet was more OPPRESSED than he was.

I soon found my true home, however, on the uk-indie mailing list, which at that time was full of people going to gigs every night, discovering exciting new bands like... er... Kula Shaker and David Devant And His Spirit Wife... and THRILLING to that perenial favourite "What actually IS Indie?" More than this though, it was a way for enthusiastic gig-goers and people in bands from all over the world to get in touch with each other and become friends. Nowadays it's commonplace to have friends that you talk to on email every day but have never met, but back then it felt like you were surfing on the very tip of the cyber-wave, and when people fell in love and ended up getting married through email it was so new and rare that it made it onto the TV news. These days the only times it gets on telly is when it's a dating agency advert.

We didn't do much falling in love on uk-indie, but we DID do a lot of falling in PUBS, the direct result of which was that we started having PUB IDEAS like putting on our own gigs or releasing TAPES (like i say, it was the CUSP of The Future) featuring our own bands. In 1997 Mr Frankie Machine of AAS reknown had volunteered to compile a tape and had then spent about a YEAR badgering people into supplying him with material - since bands were INVENTED there have been compilation tapes, and they have ALWAYS started with high excitement and ended with some poor sod saying "PLEASE just record your bloody song and send it to me!" A million years from now ZOOT42 AND THE XYLONS will be PROMISING someone that their brain hologram of "Binary Baby 1101011" will HONESTLY be finished soon, just as, back in the mists of time, He Who Hit Stone Hard was HIDING from He Who Make Compilation because he'd still not finished his masterpiece, "BANG BANG BANG (BANG)".

However, he did finally get it all put together and so, to celebrate, we organised a gig in Oxford. Our most succesful member, Andy From The Bigger The God, lived there and it was also fairly handy for lots of people. The Bigger The God were booked to play, I WRANGLED myself onto the bill, and we asked a band called Szeki Kurva if they'd like to come to.

I'd first played with them the year before with my old band, Voon, at The Bull & Gate. The next day I posted a long RANT about them on uk-indie and, in short succession, wrote the song "Bands From London (are shit)", which goes like this:

Come on Joshua, come on Jemima
Drag the crowd from the gallery down
For my thesis on situationism
We're gonna to form a rock and roll ban
We've got a name and we've got a theory
About where pop culture went wrong
We've got back projections and a glittery frock
All we ain't got is songs

Because bands from London are shit
Bands from London are shit
We think we're avant garde, but all we are
Is stuck-up inbred upper class twits

At the publishing company where i work
Is a guy who plays the guitar
He called to say that we should smash the state
From the phone in his company car
Sarah's got a friend who works at the standard
Who says he will review our gig
We're playing at Pamela's mother's party
Quaffing vodders until we are sick

Because bands from London are shit
Bands from London are shit
We think we're well hard, but all we are
Is stuck-up inbred upper class twits.

We defy lower class laws of gender
Pretend we're poor even though our guitars are all fenders
As Alternative Rockers, we are all in the debt
Of the architect of Art-Rock, Alanis Morisonette.

Because bands from London are shit
Bands from London are all shit.


As it turned out Szeki Kurva weren't EXACTLY like that, but BY GOLLY an AWFUL lot of Bands From London REALLY WERE and, funnily enough, they continue to be so to this very day. I should point out that the Bands From London referred to here are a SPECIFIC type that are, basically, like ALL Local Bands except that THEIR little knot of friends includes journalists and moneyed twits who form record companies and then INFLICT them on the rest of us. They play almost ENTIRELY within the M25, only venturing to the safe confines of Brighton or, ONCE, to somewhere in The Midlands where they're so frightened to play in front of an actual audience that they split up IMMEDIATELY. Back then ROMO (ask your Grandad) had just swept through the indie nation like a dose of gastroenteritis, but nowadays the best place to find such bands is in Shoreditch.

A few years beforehand my REMARKS would have been made in a pub and that would have been the end of it, but here on the CLIFF-EDGE OF MODERNITY things had changed, and one of Szeki Kurva was able to use Alta Vista Search to FIND my remarks, also my email address, and send me DARK THREATS OF VIOLENCE. For a fenland lad like me this was quite terrifying at first - how did he know so much about me? Could they REALLY be following me around, waiting for a chance to KNIFE me? - before I realised what was going on and chose instead to feel quite flattered by the attention. Rather than be QUIETED by this i decided the best course of action was to FACE UP to them, and invited them to come and play at the Oxford gig.

I'm really REALLY glad I did. They arrived just as me, Andy and Frankie were rehearsing our "all star band" version of "Lazarus", with Charlie from Szeki Kurva storming into the room like an ESSEX DALEK, alert, annoyed, and ready to EXTERMINATE. They went on first and were a REVELATION - when I'd seen them before I'd been bemused and annoyed by all their fripperies and stage extras, like dancers and lightshows and remote control cars, but as none of that had come with them this time it was just a MASSIVE RACKET with Charlie in the middle telling the entire room to FACK OFF. Between the HUGE NOISE the banter consisted mostly of offering FIGHTS to the audience. "COME ON! Who WANTS it?" he demanded. Full of beer and having a GRATE time i gleefully shouted back... and found that SUDDENLY the entire rest of the audience had taken TWO STEPS BACKWARDS.

Happily, this was NOT the start of a FITE but the start of a beautiful friendship that has lasted through to this very day, as it turned out that, quite apart from being a DANGEROUS ROCK LUNATIC the aforementioned Charlie is ALSO a lovely chap with an UNNERVING knowledge of both GUNS and MUSICAL THEATRE. His next band were, and is, The Fighting Cocks, which has kept up the shouting and swearing but blended it with girl groups and choreography - if you've never seen them, I'd heartily endorse doing so.

We actually ended up NEARLY releasing their first single through AAS - we were all ready to go when the band DISAPPEARED suddenly. Several months later we heard from them again - they'd signed up to a Proper Major Record Label to release the song and felt SO guilty about not doing it with us that they sent us a HUNDRED QUID finders fee. Thus it was the ONLY record we ever had anything to do with that made a profit!

Back at the gig we had no idea this was going to happen, so carried on as we were with the rest of us doing progressively more drunken sets ending up with about ten of us piling into a photobooth at Oxford Station and doing a raucous versions of The Songs Of Billy Bragg. No American Communists appeared, so we got on our trains and headed home, our destination - THE FUTURE.

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