Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time Chapter 4
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 4: Death to Rock Music
(Read Chapters 1 Here, 2 Here and 3 Here)
Dismayed by the record industry’s insistence on talent as a prime requisite for signing a major contract, I have hit upon the wizard wheeze of taking an entirely different approach to the rock legend status that must be my inevitable destiny. I’ve bought a £15 Watkins guitar in a junk shop and decided to form a band with no plans whatsoever to trouble the thoughts of any label. Or any chart.
This change in direction is the ultimate outcome of a random phone call one Saturday morning from Mr Handsome. I am dimly aware of this locally notorious fella, firstly because he is stupidly good looking in a manner few people can pull off without accidentally making a Hollywood movie, and secondly because people keep telling me that he’s planning to put on gigs. I’m always interested in seeing if there’s any space in such an intention for me to somehow eek out a penny or two.
Mr Handsome has somehow managed to book a hall, hire a PA, contract a top 10 Indie Chart Band, and sell all the tickets. Personally, I suspect he may have done this simply by looking people in the eyes until they imagine he might date them. He has that effect on most people. Imagine Steve McQueen’s eyes and nose on top of Paul Simenon’s chin. Honestly, when he stares at you for a bit you go wobbly. What his knee trembling features have failed to do, however, is understand the gap between putting on some of your mates banging their arms in the direction of the strings on a guitar in a Salvation Army hall above an off licence and the somewhat different and more taxing needs of catering for the dreaded technical rider expectations of a touring act. Upon arrival, the headliners have demanded that the sound engineer set their mics up. Mr Handsome is on the phone because he’s not actually sure what that is but he thinks I might know. I agree to pop down to the Satellite Club and talk some technical hoohaa in front of the band.
The club sits in the middle of Grosvenor Recreation Ground, Tunbridge Wells’ oldest park, and was originally built in 1942 as a British Restaurant. After the war it was used as a school canteen until 1958, when the building then became the Satellite Youth Club, also acting as a Montessori Nursery School. Sometime in the mid 70s it had stopped doing any of that, and only the rain weathered sign clinging uncared for above its entrance reveals its past as a hotbed of youthful indiscretions. The hall has been taken over by a local amateur dramatic society as a place to store their props and costumes, and is managed by an extraordinary character with an accent like David Niven and a bonhomie approach to life that causes him to say yes to just about anything. In this case Mr Handsome has stared at him a bit and he’s agreed to let 300 kids go bonkers for an evening.
I arrive and attempt to explain how to plug a microphone in and what all those cables are for. Mr Handsome has a gang of people gathered around him that he appears to have hypnotised into believing anything is possible, but it quickly becomes clear that, in this specific case, while it isn’t impossible that one of them might get a degree in acoustic management at some point in the future, that almost definitely isn’t going to happen by 7pm this evening. Mr Handsome stares at me meaningfully for a bit and I somehow agree that yes I can stay on and act as the sound engineer. I know what the slidey things do on the big flat thing that looks like a spaceship control panel so I’m the best option available.
The first act take the stage. A bunch of local kids accidentally make their way through what nearly passes for a set in a manner which suggests that they found the guitars and drums on their way there this evening. They go down extraordinarily well. Let’s make this clear - about 100 people at the front of the stage are apparently having the best time ever while the band have to stop and start the third song at least three times because they don’t know how it goes. The second act need my assistance to plug their keyboard into an amp because they didn’t know you had to do that and normally just use the in-built speakers on the back of the Casio keyboard their mum bought out of Kays Catalogue. They stumble their way through a five song set that seems to be constructed out of will, hope and determination. The crowd laps this up while I sit behind the desk trying to work out what’s happening.
Finally the headliners take the stage. Now, I want to make it clear that these four young men have plainly had a rehearsal. They might have stretched to two. The songs start and finish in the right place and mainly at the right time and all of them together. This is a novelty for the acts so far this evening and is a key illustrative element that explains why this particular band have been chosen to headline this auspicious occasion. The crowd goes wild while I’m still trying to work out why nobody has bothered to learn how to play their instruments properly. The songs all centre around girls and how much they’d like to meet some, and are played with an enthusiastic approach to hitting some things vaguely in time with some other things but not necessarily all the things together at the same time as all the other things as that would plainly be uncool and too much effort. Everyone in the hall appears to agree that this is an excellent approach to making pop songs and much better than all that in time, well played, properly sung nonsense that record labels and the radio will insist on describing as music. And which I’ve spent the last six years apparently wasting my time on.
The gig concludes. Mr Handsome hands me a carrier bag with some records in it. It contains not only two singles by the headliners, but one seven inch vinyl by the support act that didn’t know how to plug a keyboard in. I can’t work this out at all. Who has agreed to press these records? As I’m leaving with a puzzled expression on my face someone mutters that it was a ‘great C86 night’. I haven’t heard this expression before and decide to look it up.
C86 was a cassette compilation released by the British music magazine NME in 1986, featuring new bands licensed from British independent record labels of the time. As a term, C86 quickly evolved into shorthand for jangly guitars and simple pop songs structures, although revisiting the tape recently only about a quarter of the tracks sounded anything like that. The much more dominant characteristic of the assembled tunes was what John Peel lovingly referred to as "shambling" - a self-consciously primitive approach to the creation of music and a deliberate intention to stay well rooted in underachievement. I get home and pop the records on. They sound like they were recorded in a bucket. Underwater. With a washboard and a tea chest. They are also quite, quite brilliant.
I have a fever dream in which I realise that I might have got this whole thing completely wrong. Next morning I wake up, phone The Tall Fella I always wanted to be in a band with, even though he can’t really play guitar even more than I can’t really play guitar, and we agree to form a new band. This new outfit is founded on a 5 step manifesto and it goes like this:
No playing any instrument you’ve spent longer than ten minutes holding. In your entire life.
All the songs will be a bit like songs you think you’ve already heard, but you’ve only heard them from a distance and don’t really know how they go
Anyone caught practising at home is a traitor
Stripey t-shirts
Death to rock music
We decide to abandon point 1 of the manifesto very quickly when we learn that Mr Handsome has got a bass guitar. He’s sort of in a sort of band with a sort of drummer and we decide to merge the two bands into something that sort of vaguely resembles a coherent pop act in the all new shambling style. We spend all of fifteen minutes writing a thirty minute set, which we achieve by not worrying about whether we’ve heard the chord progression before or if any of it sounds like anything else, and focus mainly on not practising too hard and buying stripey t-shirts. We work out how long Watkins guitars will stay in tune for - answer; about 4 minutes, so two songs if you’re quick about it - and buy up all available terrible guitars in a three mile radius from charity shops and jumble sales. We play our first gig some three weeks later and it’s marvellous and wondrous and all the things that being in a proper band that spends time worrying about the correct string gauges, which foot pedals you need, and do you have the latest haircut, isn't.
Some people had punk in 1976. With its DIY ethos and its insistence that you could form a band with three chords and some good intentions, it was undoubtedly an important moment for the UK music scene and its fantastic organic, rule-breaking, approach to music making. But I was eleven and a very sick child lying in a hospital throughout the summer when it started to happen. Although eventually Strummer et al would always lead me to ask myself, even to this day, “what would Joe do”, it was the ‘let’s give it a go’ attitude of C86 that made me believe that you can, actually, do anything you want. You don’t need anyone’s permission to create a night, start a scene, form a band, make records. You can just go out one evening, see something you like, then wake up the next morning and decide to do it.
Everyone needs, and is entitled to, a cultural permission slip. I got lucky and found mine in a disused hall in an underused park in Tunbridge Wells because no one else knew how to plug some cables in. This sort of ludicrously lucky once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity seems to have happened to me more than it does to most people and I’m left feeling slightly uncertain why I don’t play the lottery a bit more. I, of course, had no idea whatsoever that a shambling bunch of enthusiastic amateurs who didn’t seem to know the rules, and probably wouldn’t have cared about them even if they did, would set me off in a totally different direction. One that would ultimately lead to whatever this is that someone recently called ‘my career’.
If you’re wondering if this set of tales of daft things that happened to me has a point, other than your mild entertainment at the absurdity of it all, it’s driving towards a set of basic concepts about what sort of society/country/town/city we need to live in so that people can have ‘careers’ like mine. This will probably be broken down into a set of easily understandable concepts that drive towards that outcome, so here’s the first:
You have to be able to see it to be able to be it.
When we take culture out of our towns and cities, when we let access to music collapse, when we make it too difficult to just get on and make things happen, we are failing tens of thousands of young people who are just like I was; educational misfits, non-conformists, bored by rules, unable to find the spark to set them off in a positive direction. Let them see it and they can be it.