Babies Are Better Than Bands

I used to sing in a band, I’m a drummer, really, but there were two drummers and I lost the toss up. I didn’t do too badly, though. In fact I practically did it for a living, once.
There were five of us, making a racket, enjoying the gang mentality. We weren’t very good, but in our teens, in the early 90s, it felt necessary, vocational.
Although that might have been a collective reluctance to sign off the dole, get jobs and move away from the parental home.
It was a life of ear splitting rehearsals in dank cellars with dodgy electrics during which egos bristled, single cans of Super Brew shared, deeply personal misspelt lyrics on folded sheets of A4 deconstructed and laughed at by Philistine bass players.
Dreams of Brixton Academy, gigs playing to four people, that kind of thing.
The highlight of my pop career was getting a phone call from John Peel. Swiftly followed by a low point. My mother answered it.
The band had just released a record. Released as in we made a half decent recording of two songs and got a couple of hundred singles pressed up for peanuts to sell at gigs. I kept forgetting to bring them along so they stayed unopened for months in a brown cardboard box under my bed.
Accompanied by a badly written press release, our campaign to reclaim the charts resulted in a total of two singles being dispatched to the radio. One went to Bruno Brookes, because we thought we were achingly ironic, and one to John Peel because, as the bass guitarist pointed out, “he’ll play any old tosh if it sounds like you recorded it in a toilet.”
Philistine.
Peel was God. Get a play on his show and things change.
Three to four weeks later: “A man from Radio One phoned you up this morning” says mum, matter of factly. Instant wake up, jaw hits floor, snakes alive in my stomach. “I can’t remember who he was, he didn’t leave a number, he just said he liked your record.” she looked at me, a little disappointed, “you haven’t made a record have you?”After frantic cross examination I worked out that it was John Peel and that he’d called to say he was going to play said record, sometime that week on his show.
Joy was matched to horror when Mum said she told him I was still in bed. Apparently there then followed a 10 minute conversation about how his sons spend most of the day in bed too and that he was sometimes at a loss to understand the teenage mind.
“He was very nice, actually” said mum, “he went on a bit, though”.
I wanted to fly and die at the same time.True to his word he did play the record. Twice, actually. It sounded a bit flat on the radio. But it was most righteously cool, nonetheless. And he didn’t mention the cosy chat with my mum, either.
As a result the band got wider attention. The three or four people who came to our gigs brought their girlfriends. But stranger still we were advanced some money by a proper record label as a “development” deal. We opened a band bank account. We were meant to spend wisely on rehearsing in a suitable environment and recording a really good demo tape with a proper producer so that we might develop as a tight, honed unit with chart potential.
We spent most of it at the pub at the end of our street and developed the DTs.
The drummer was never the same. Always delicately balanced between drunk and catatonic, being taken seriously by a record label sent him over the edge.
“This is the quiet bit, Phil” we would shout mid-song in rehearsals, “stop shaking”. Towards the end of our ‘career’ we decided, by necessity, to ‘go acoustic’, simply so Phil could just play the maracas.
When it came to making a really good recording with a proper producer we found, to our great surprise, that we only had a hundred quid left.
This was bad on many levels, the highest one, the one we would likely to be dropped from bound and gagged, feet dipped in concrete, was the fact that, technically, what we’d already spent wasn’t actually our money in the first place. We went to the pub to worry about this.
The brilliant idea we came up with was to change the name of the band.
As you may have gathered by now, our commitment to re pointing the wall of sound, to shaking up the pop charts to their very foundations with songs bursting with searing and catchy indictments of modern Britain, was questionable.
Truth is, I think we preferred talking about being in a band, rather than being in a band. We were a bunch of chancers with guitars who had a lucky break. And then broke it.
As it happened the record label who gave us the cash were bought out, ironically by a multi-national whose roots were in the brewing industry. The A&R man assigned to us was sacked, as were most of the label’s roster of artists.
Other than one phone call from a teenager in London who now claimed to be running the legal and contracts department we never heard from them again.
I guess we still owe them the money, and they still own the rights to the recordings we never made but we broke up pretty soon after that and moved to different parts of the country.
We’re all still friends, occasionally we meet up and discuss the possibility of reforming as a maraca ensemble for shaky Phil’s funeral. Phil, bless him, doesn’t think this is particularly funny, he’s done the 12 steps and hasn’t had a drop in a decade. He likes to remind us “teachers, journos and house husbands” that he is the only one of us who’s made a career out of rock and roll.
He sticks up fly posters for bands, £15 per 100.