Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 6
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 6: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes… in Pluckley.
(Want to read the previous chapters? Links at the bottom)
As the partial instigators of a whole burgeoning scene, demand for our deliberately inept band has been escalating. A lot of the DIY nature of the post C86 scene is driven by people just like us in far flung places like Bath, Chelmsford, Ramsgate, and Southampton, and the way it works is brilliantly simple; you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. As a group of people connected to a regular club night that is packing people in, everyone wants to play with us and the way to do that is to let us come and play with them.
We have therefore hawked our amps up five flights of stairs in Chelmsford, worked our way through at least seven Watkins rapiers in Folkestone, and even turned up in front of a highly confused set of London hipsters at the Bull & Gate. Verdict; all our songs sound like we made them up quickly by stealing them off someone else and playing them so badly as to make them unrecognisable. The London crowd seem to think this is a bad thing, we think it’s our greatest asset.
All this playing everywhere regularly is, however, having an unfortunate effect on our professionalism, by which I mean you can’t keep playing all over the place without accidentally learning something. By osmosis, our deliberately terrible band with no discernible talent has accidentally become a fairly tight unit playing things which loosely resemble some actual songs. Things take a further turn for the absurd when it becomes apparent that people actually like the noise we make and I find myself in the odd position of once again being in a semi-successful local act despite a crystal clear intention to mock the whole idiocy of the music industry by doing everything possible to avoid that outcome.
It is decided we might as well capitalise on this unwarranted and unexpected interest and make a record. This, in turn, means we are going to have to buy some guitars that stay in tune with each other for longer than 4 minutes and vaguely learn how to play some of the songs. Our commitment to usher in the long overdue death of rock music is finding itself on very shaky ground.
4 songs are committed to 2 inch tape during one afternoon, and some six weeks later a packing crate containing 500 copies of my first ever, real life, this actually exists, it is not a dream, 12” EP arrives. The artwork for this masterpiece is entirely in Black and White, because it’s cheaper that way, and we have no planned method for distributing or selling them, but it’s real. Something I’ve been dreaming about since my sister showed me The Monkees on TV when I was about 7 has actually happened. I have made a record. I can hold it in my hands and physically show it to people. I spend at least a week doing exactly that.
The record completely fails to attract any attention from any music media or bother the charts in any way shape or form, but it does further seal our local reputation. Other bands might have amps that work, a close knowledge of which pedals to buy that make that whooshing noise, and even be fully informed on the exact procedure of how to obtain a residency that pays actual cash at the Frog & Bucket in Ide Hill. But we have a physical piece of plastic with sounds on it and people actually buy it from us. For money.
Obviously these days pretty much everything we ever recorded and every note we ever performed would be immediately available on every streaming service known to man in every part of the known universe. But in the days before the ubiquity of music, a vinyl record was something special. You could take it with you to places and show it to people and they would immediately think things like ‘ok, this is a real band’ even though we quite obviously weren’t. Other bands would be simply furious when they saw it, especially if they had heard us play beforehand. A vinyl record is an artefact. It exists long after whatever is in the grooves might have ceased to exist. Our little piece of vinyl went on to have a fairly remarkable but immensely weird long-tail life as an exemplar of ‘British indie’ of the period, mainly in Japan. Recently a mint condition copy of it changed hands for the startling sum of $340, with the seller noting that it ‘contains the original lyric sheet’, by which I think they mean the photocopied piece of A4 I’d pop round the corner, got printed, and stuffed into every copy. $340 being a full $140 more than it cost us to record it, I’m imagining its value lies in its obscurity and rarity rather than in any desire to pay attention to the sounds on the actual plastic, but still… if we’d known we could sell them all for $340 each some forty years later we might have printed an extra 500 as some sort of pension plan.
With dozens of shows under our belt and a vinyl record in our rucksacks, we are suddenly the band everyone in Kent and Sussex wants to see. This causes us to confront the reality that one of us is sticking too closely to the original manifesto to be as amateurish as possible and will need to be replaced. The drummer (its always the drummer isn’t it?) is despatched in the style of Pete Best, and his place on the seat behind us is swiftly taken up by The Music Store Owner, who does a neat sideline in being the second loudest drummer in the local area. He absolutely insists he will need to know how the songs go and we start rehearsing. Our original manifesto, in which we set out to demonstrate that the whole record industry is a farce, is now little more than a distant memory. We have failed ourselves and become a proper band.
This all goes to our heads a bit and we start actively promoting ourselves as a group, an activity that completely takes up all the time we had originally been determined to spend wearing stripey t-shirts. Our motto is no longer Death to Rock Music. It is ‘We Will Need Hummus on the Rider’. We actively discuss things that actual bands talk about, like what we should wear. In our new drummer’s case, the answer always seems to be ‘a pair of spangly mirror ball shorts that are two sizes too small and a baseball cap with FUCK OFF written on it’.
One Friday night we are booked to play Pluckley Village Hall, a local promoter having assured us that he knows loads of people who love the band and they are all prepared to pay money to see us. This extraordinary claim is more than validated when it turns out that he has persuaded every single breathing teenager within ten miles radius to attend the event. If you want to quantify quite how extraordinary that is, look Pluckley up on a map.
A local band perform a set that we would previously have been proud to present, it containing no more than four songs which they perform at least twice each on instruments they have obviously been lent by a local school. We take the stage with an intro tape, having insisted that the dry ice that accompanies our entrance be held back behind the stage curtains which should be pulled back dramatically to reveal that we have arrived.
Three songs in the power suddenly cuts out. Various members of the local promoters entourage run around trying to find out what’s happened and the power is restored. Two songs later it goes out again. Then back on. Then off. On. Off. On. Off. Eventually it is revealed that two of the assembled throng of teenage pop enthusiasts have responded to a previously unnoticed amorous element to our music and have chosen to attempt to have sex up against a wall while we play. This wall unfortunately contains the master power switch for the whole hall and one of the two participants has been enthusiastically banging the other ones head against it. Loading our amps back into the van after the show, we are surrounded by a throng of new fans clutching our vinyl and demanding autographs. Someone signs an arm and it is promised this will be turned into a tattoo.
Somewhere in the vicinity of Pluckley, a village mostly famous for its claim to the the most haunted village in Britain, it is entirely possible that one of its 1081 total inhabitants is reading this with a long faded and entirely incomprehensible record of the night we became a rock band etched permanently into their upper arm. If they’re reading this, I can only apologise. Our 15 minutes of fame had arrived and we had completely lost our way.
It would take us at least another two years to work out we had become the thing we originally set out to mock. In the meantime we would make the fundamental errors of learning to play our instruments, writing some actual songs, and putting some of them onto cassettes which we send out to record labels so they would have something to tape over.
It’s odd being in a sort of semi-legendary but incredibly localised band. You feature regularly in the local paper and people will stop you in the street and ask how it’s going and when your next record is coming out. But you only have to go a couple of train stops away from this epicentre of local fame and you’re immediately back to the bottom of the bill act that no one pays any attention to. You occasionally pile into a van and drive forty miles to support acts who are equally as famous and revered as you are in their own bubble of notoriety, and assume that those bands aren’t like your band - they aren’t ever going to make it, they are just a local band. There used to be literally thousands of bands like this scattered across the British isles, way more than could ever reasonably expect to attract that all elusive record contract or the almost unimaginable accolade of a mainstream radio play. The arrival of the internet, with its constant 24/7 access to every single note you might ever perform, anywhere at any time, killed this colloquial little scene. Acts in the 21st Century don’t have the ties that used to bind us to our own very specific geography. Having a viral hit on social media in an entirely different continent has replaced driving to a village hall thirty miles away to bash through your songs so local teenagers have a soundtrack to have sex to.
I was famous for one night only in Pluckley. I didn’t feel the need for recognition, or the burning ambition to have my ‘art’ heard, that are essential requirements to take you any further than that. My days of standing in front of people asking them to please admire the noise I was making were drawing to a close. I wouldn’t miss them.
Catch up on previous chapters:
Interesting comment about locally-famous bands. I agree, this used to be a thing (and remember the jokes about Runrig, who would sell out stadiums across Scotland - but played to a pub full of Scottish expats when they came to London).
After a while of not being a thing, this seems to be happening again. People like The Courteeners (who regularly do 50k tickets in Manchester, but sub-10k in London), Jamie Webster, Gerry Cinnamon (sold out Hampden Park twice last summer!), The Lathums and others - all have huge home followings that don't necessarily translate elsewhere.
Great article on this from earlier in the year - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/24/theres-civic-pride-involved-the-acts-scoring-no-1-albums-thanks-to-regional-fanbases