Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 13
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 13: A Deep Deep Purple Patch
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
It wasn’t immediate, but the impact of being ‘the venue where Oasis played’ had both a short, medium and long term impact on how financially viable the venue was, what it meant to people, and would come to mean for the town and the local community.
Oasis’s show on 26 March 1994 was the sort of milestone turning point you can’t really see until it’s a long way behind you, little more than a dot in the rearview mirror, but looking back now and reviewing what would happen over the next 5 years I can plainly see how it completely altered perceptions of the venue, and of me, within the music industry. Up until that show we had been those idiots in that backwards town who were always on the phone trying to get bands who didn’t want to play there to come and knock some tunes out. After it happened, we were suddenly part of a circuit that was very specific to ‘the Britpop Years’ ( © Stuart Maconie ).
So many things have been written about Britpop that there’s almost nothing you can say which people haven’t heard before. Opinions, positive, negative and just plain indifferent, are fully formed and unlikely to be nudged in any direction by anything I tell you about it. But I’ll start with this: Britpop didn’t exist. The range of things that got labelled Britpop for the sake of a bit of marketing and hyping up sales of Select Magazine, NME and Melody Maker were so stupidly diverse as to make any attempt to pigeonhole them into a movement a pointless exercise. What did happen, which was much more interesting, was that suddenly everyone thought ‘If they can do it, so can I’. In terms of the impact that attitude change had, then the notional conceit of ‘Britpop’ as a thing was as important for live music, and actually even for recorded music, as the sixties revolution, punk, the C86 scene, rave or the briefly lived baggy movement. I bet some people found that statement unbelievably annoying but it’s just true.
You didn’t have to be ‘Britpop’ to benefit from ‘Britpop’, and that was certainly true for our little venue. Bands supposedly within the scene started to arrive with regularity because that was what you did if you wanted to make it; you played a toilet in Tunbridge Wells. Equally, bands that weren’t in the NW1 bubble and felt alienated by it, particularly in the local community, reacted against it. Newton’s third law states that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If scene Britpop exerts a force on object the Holy Toilet, the Tunbridge Wells Forum also exerts an equal and opposite force on Britpop. Or something like that. The local reaction to Britpop was not to create loads of bands who had been to an Oxfam shop and heard one record by The Kinks, it was to create a series of incredibly difficult little non-scenes within a big Unscene, ultimately resulting in the founding of a record label, Unlabel, which dedicated itself to releasing records an astonishingly small number of people would care incredibly deeply about. .
Yes, some bands turned up who were so archly ‘Britpop’ as to make it painful watching them trying to carry it off, but the alleged scene also had within it everything from Gene, Forum performance on 27 May 1994, first performance outside London, to Super Furry Animals, 16 February 1996, playing a double headline with Bis who had caused a massive split in the deadly serious music audience by appearing on Top of the Pops before they had a record. ‘They can’t even play their instruments’ ran the outrage, something I thought was a tremendously important part of what they were doing, but there you go. If you’re trying to describe a new alternative rock movement that has within it both Shed Seven, two times at The Forum, 10 June 1994 and 17 September 1994, and Placebo, 18 November 1995, but also contains Dub War, 26 January 1996, then you’re on a hiding to nothing more than a handy way to sell magazines.
It was incredible for business and for our reputation, and most importantly of all it sold tickets. The fact that it used to sell so many tickets actually caused more than just a little bit of friction within the community who felt the Forum belonged to them. Looking back now I can see that it did belong to them and they had a right to feel that way, but at the time it caused a flurry of accusations that I would consistently book in bands on the grounds that they would shift tickets and make us money, something I was definitely doing but which the accusers found to be against the spirit of the whole thing. This determination to book bands that people liked came to be viewed as a slightly heretical purpose by the more sincerely authentic members of the local music community. By this point only two of the original four of us remained who had started the venue, and we dealt with this by settling into a Ying/Yang model of responsibility, liability and attitude. This can best be practically imagined as one of us accepting that there were thought to be a bit of a bastard, hello it’s me, and the other one persuading people not to give up on the venue despite that, Mr Handsome.
The soul of the Forum, the nice one, the person who really represents what it is, has always been, is now, and always will be. Mr Handsome. He has a mind like a social worker and a heart slightly bigger than a Blue Whale. He also has the patience of a saint, a key personal characteristic required to negotiate his way through explaining calmly that yes, Mark has put on Longpigs for a third time, 15 March 1996, but we really do need the money, and yes he has managed to get some of it out of me so he can spend it on a night where the guest list will be larger than the paying customers and every band performing will have signed up to some sort of hidden cult like pact that ensures they have agreed to avoid playing anything that vaguely resembles a tune. In turn, I had quietly settled into an acceptance that I was more than a bit disliked by some of the regulars and the more purist musicians, simply agreeing with Mr Handsome that for the venue to function someone had to be out there doing commercial things and being hated for them so someone inside the venue could do noncommercial things and be liked for them. We honestly didn’t really think it was like that, but we publicly pretended it was because it was just easier than explaining that yes Space will be playing, 15 June 1996, because even though they have treacherously recorded a tune that has landed in the top ten we need to do it because it will be totally sold out and no that doesn’t mean that we have spat upon the legacy of Slint and all they stood for.
Between the two of us this became something of a running joke, where I would regularly phone Mr Handsome to gleefully announce that I had secured a Kula Shaker show, two in fact, 1 December 1995 and then 14 June 1996 the week in which their album hit number one, in the full knowledge that this would send the Forum clique into a frenzy of derision and righteous anger because they weren’t a serious proper band like, for example, Mogwai - who would also go on to perform on 23 May 1997, proving once again that even if you were fundamentally opposed to it, ‘Britpop’ created opportunities for just about everyone. I always found the Mogwai ‘Blur = Shit’ to be a wholly remarkable piece of opportunistic marketing which elevated the profile of the band in a way that was exactly the same as methodology being used by Savage & Best to make Menswear a household name. All Hype, as Longpigs’ own t-shirt rightly described it.
Between Mr Handsome and myself we knew these respective roles we had been assigned were nonsense. He was as worried to make sure the venue was as financially sustainable as I was, but we knew that its local reputation, and its community built purpose, was an incredibly important part of what made it tick and function. We had learned how to make things work so we could be a little bit of all things to all people, only seeing really fractious and difficult moments when the commercial needs of the business would override the ethical will of the local community. I seem to recall that the week I had to bump a five band bill of math rock to make a date available for Reef was a particularly painful one for people’s understanding of why the club was open and trading. Short answer: 250 people paying £6 each is better than 12 people paying £2 each, so yes we will be moving it.
We did have a vision at the heart of what we were doing, but we had to make compromises to deliver it. Those compromises were often hated by some of the community, but they didn’t have to look the bank manager in the eye and we did. And in among learning how to actually make the business function we were still having tremendous amounts of fun. I mean, superhuman amounts of terrific fun. So much so that huge parts of it remain locked in the back of my memory bank as little more than a blur.
There was the night where after a particularly enjoyable three hour lock in I took a phone call at 5am from the incredibly polite tour manager, who whispered the simple request to me ‘er… you haven’t got the guitarist with you have you?’ The band were halfway to Bradford before they had done a head count, discovering that the six string plucker was surprisingly absent from the van, which was explained shortly afterwards when we found him fast asleep cuddling the bowl of the men’s toilet. Human pyramids were a thing for a while, with the athletic and determined members of David Devant & His Spirit Wife being the holders of the title ‘bands that have put their logo on the ceiling’ for some months by using their chosen method of seven people across the base, then six, then five, then four etc. The three members of Feeder took a neater approach and just climbed on each others shoulders and took the logo down and replaced it with their name scratched in chalk.
Some bands we booked simply because we wanted to, meaning that I am the only entirely independent UK promoter ever to have directly booked The Divine Comedy in the UK. I had stumbled across them one night in the Astoria, of which significantly more in the next chapter, and instantly knew that we had to persuade everyone to put a smoking jacket on and see them. Our reward was a full club watching a very young Mr Hannon sneak back on to the stage to perform My Lovely Horse, a track I would not hear him touch again for another 25 years.
They say you should never meet your heroes, a policy we determined to ignore completely and just book everyone we liked or admired. This included using the incredibly thriving supposedly ‘Britpop’ scene to effectively rehabilitate some of the bands of the fallow 1990 to 1993 years who we just thought people were wrong about. We would book Cardiacs every time anyone asked us despite their absolute dedication to ruining the PA and the light by filling them with confetti and foam. They were genuinely one of the most phenomenally live acts I ever saw. No one left the room without being covered in something and left dazed and confused by their time changes and complete disregard for the rules of pop. We simply loved Bivouac because they were so ear shatteringly loud, so would always find a space in the diary for them and then book an appointment with a hearing specialist afterwards. The Wedding Present started to treat the place as a second home, something I’m proud to say they still do today - the sort of band that transcend any scene or trend and simply do what they do the way they do it in front of the people who want to see them do it at that time. Every so often we would just amuse ourselves by doing something everybody said we shouldn’t because we could. These Animal Men for two nights at Christmas after they hadn’t sold the venue out once? Yes. And they sold it out both times.
In the middle of all this, my own personal life was a bit of a mess. To make all this happen, I was spending a tremendous amount of Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays hanging about in dark rooms in the back of inappropriate pubs and clubs across London with agents, managers, minor league scene wannabees and the occasional major star, all of them engaged in a game of last man standing at ridiculous hours of the morning. My week would therefore start with a series of milk trains trying to get back to a bed I rarely got to sleep in, while the weekends would see me up a ladder doing my best impression of a sound man trying to get the touring engineer to understand that the room was a really funny shape and the answer was not to turn everything up a bit. I lived mainly off kebabs, Ginsters pasties and Jack Daniels and coke. In the middle of all this I accidentally found myself thankfully divorced, having accidentally and mistakenly got married a couple of years earlier. As per my usual habit of falling on my feet, the timing of the separation had given me the complete freedom to build a career and to have the most amount of fun it was possible for a single human to have. I was gleefully making the most of this situation when another life changing moment would set me off on a new course.
Ocean Colour Scene were one of the bands that weren’t really very ‘Britpop’ at all but had ridden in on the wave of music that had shot them onto the radio and out on tour. One night in January 1996 we have them booked to headline their own show and I take 2 phone calls in quick succession in the run up to the event. The first is from the local Arts Development Officer, who wants to know if it would be okay if she and a friend came down to the event to check the venue out and see the band. The second is from the agent, who wants to add the name John Smith to the guest list, and sheepishly asks if he can give him a ‘plus whatever he wants’. The first request I immediately say will be no problem, but for the mysterious Mr Smith I make slightly more demands, eventually agreeing he can have an almost unheard of plus 5.
On the night of the show the venue is packed to the rafters. The Arts Development Officer and her friend have taken up a spot halfway down the hall. I can see her quite clearly even in the dim light of the hall as she has a striking mane of blonde curly hair. I wander over to say hello and I’m immediately struck by how astonishingly gorgeous she is, an impact which is made all the sharper as it is so out of kilter with the surroundings; imagine finding Nicole Kidman hanging about near the bins of a working men’s club. It’s like that. I exchange some pleasantries, but am aware that I’m starting to stare a bit and making a fool of myself, something that is obviously not appreciated by her friend who I’m guessing is pretty certain he is on a date. I blurt out that she should come to a gig with me sometime, which she seems a bit unsure about, although not as unsure as the person who has accompanied her to this one, but before she can turn me down, or he can punch me in the face, I am rescued from the embarrassment by a hail from the bar - it is the Driver who is frantically waving and pointing towards the door so I make my way through the crowd to see what’s up.
What’s up is that Mr John Smith has arrived with a gang of about eleven people, Luckily for him I am about to break all our guest list rules, and the legal capacity of the building, by permitting them all to enter while I stare at them open mouthed because Mr John Smith is an extremely famous, and I mean really properly actually famous, music celebrity. This is the man who was Moon’s childhood hero, who we had jointly placed on a pedestal of coolness which not even his dabbling about with terrible career choices in the late eighties could knock him off. I try to stop gawping, but it’s quite difficult because It’s Really Him is actually in our stupid and daft little club. He is perfectly amicable and a real delight, mingling with the crowd and finding a spot at the end of the bar, but it quickly becomes clear this isn’t going to work at all because all 250 people in the room have now whispered to each other that a properly famous person is here, It’s Really Him, and are now facing away from the stage where the band are due on and forming a queue in the opposite direction to try to meet It’s Really Him.
I climb down the ladder from the mixing desk, jump over the bar, lean in, and ask It’s Really Him if he wants to come upstairs with me. He seems initially puzzled by this offer, but I go on to explain that the sound desk is up there, it’s a bit more private, and he can watch the band with us. He gratefully accepts and makes his way up the ladder, almost like a normal person would only much more famously, and sits down next to the two of us trying to run the show from our lofty position.
“It’s private up here, right?” says It’s Really Him.
“Yes, no one can really see you” I reply, thinking this will give him a bit of peace and quiet.
“Excellent, excellent” says our childhood idol. And then pulls a supermarket shopping bag out of his pocket.
“Alright if I roll up a little one?”
He then proceeds to roll together at least nine papers into a highly complicated tapestry, shake half the contents of the Safeways plastic bag over it, then tries to loosely assemble this contraption into something that can be lit at one end and smoked at the other. Now, I’m not a smoker or a head. I’ve always found that I don’t need very much encouragement to feel a bit sleepy and spaced out, my dedication to staying up all hours of the night seems to achieve that perfectly well without assistance, but even in my limited experience this doobie would appear to be the largest reefer ever brought together by a single individual. Whole forests of weed are falling out the end of it, and the only way to keep it alight is for us to help him out by blowing on the lit end of it while he drags on the other. This he does in incredibly long intakes of breath, counting to at least 30 kangaroos on his first toke and somewhere in the region of 20 on the following ones. He ingests the entire thing in about four minutes, wobbles a bit and then smiles.
“Nice” says It’s Really Him.
The band take the stage and everything is going swimmingly. The crowd are mainly focused on the stage, although the odd one or two groups of people I can see throwing looks at our balcony position from which a wave of smoke is emerging that smells like Bob Marley is in the house. After a few songs we notice that It’s Really Him’s head is rolling backwards a bit and then snapping forwards, like he’s phasing in and out of reality. Which he is. Noticing this himself, he snaps his head up, looks us vaguely in the direction of where he thinks our eyes must be, and says;
“Private up here, right?”
“Right” I say.
“Cool” says It’s Really Him. And then produces from his other pocket a wrap about the size of an A5 leaflet folded into quarters.
“OK if I have a little line to smooth things out a bit?” he asks super politely. I mean, we can’t exactly say no or he might fall off the platform. He shuffles me slightly to one side of the desk and then proceeds to tap out a long white line of powder roughly running from channels 3 through to 21. Without the slightest pause, he produces a silver straw from his inside pocket, bends his head and takes the whole lot, all thirty to forty centimeters of it, in one go.
After this he perks up considerably, which lasts for at least ten minutes during which he whoops, hollers, beats his chest occasionally, and basically attracts the attention of the entire hall. Realising this is distracting a bit from the on stage entertainment people have paid to see, he sits down, mutters that he ‘might have overdone it a bit’ then proceeds to roll himself a second doobie about the size of a babies arm. This he again consumes in about three incredibly long and powerful drags, deciding some minutes later that he’s now too sleepy, so he gets the wrap back out. Giant doobie, massive line, giant doobie, massive line. This carries on for the full hour and a half of the headliners set.
After a couple of encores the hall starts to empty, and It’s Really Him stand up, looks around, then says, in a completely normal and unaffected voice;
“Great gig, great little venue!” then climbs jauntily down the ladder and heads backstage.
As the band are leaving an hour or so later It’s Really Him sidles up to me, leans in, and conspiratorially asks ‘you don’t know anyone who has got any Es do you?”
My life was enormously changed by this evening. I’m guessing you’re imagining that I fell into It’s Really Him’s inner circle, spending years on the road accurately measuring out the correct quantities of herbs and chemicals to maintain his equilibrium and only pausing every so often to help him out with the odd chord change or lyric suggestion as we made our way from legendary studio to sunlit beach across the world on a glorious adventure. I’m sure that would make a great book, but I’m not in it.
Something far more important and life changing had happened. I had suggested the possibility of going to see a band together to a stunningly gorgeous woman who may or may not have been on a date with someone else in the middle of the venue.
And although I was greatly distracted by the arrival of It’s Really Him, causing me to miss her initial response, she had said yes.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here:
I’m still annoyed that I was on holiday the week of 14 and 15 June 1996 so missed Space and Kula Shaker playing 3 minutes walk from my flat. Still, I apparently saw Super Furry Animals since I definitely saw BiS and usually got there for support bands since it was close enough to home to pop back there if I didn’t like them. Anyway, I felt extremely lucky at the time - and still do - to have someone booking the bands for my super-local venue who seemed to be able to get whoever was on the front of the music papers so that I could see what all the fuss was about for the cost of a couple of pints. Some I wasn’t impressed with (Shed 7, Sleeper) others (These Animal Men, Ash, S*M*A*S*H) I loved.