Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 5
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 5: If You Build It, They Will Come
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Friday morning, 2am. We are dressed in the darkest clothes we can find as we slip noiselessly into the back of the van, pulling the sliding door closed as quietly as humanly possible. We tap the back of the driver’s seat, and the vehicle pulls away with its headlights still off. We drive through a darkened and deserted Tunbridge Wells to the centre of the North Farm Industrial Estate, coasting silently the last 300 yards or so with the engine off, to the rear of the vast warehouse that is the destination for our night time nefarious activities. We scout the premises for CCTV, but it’s 1988 and in any case, what is there worth stealing? Confident we are unwatched, two of us clamber over the rear gate and begin the weekly scout for what we need while the remaining party keep an eye out. A muttered “yes… got ‘em” signals action stations for all as we start the process of filling the van with our ill-gotten gains. We know exactly what we need, we’ve been doing this every other week for three months. We count them into the van - 6, 12, 18, 24, plus 2 for emergencies - this count is important. Take exactly what we need, no more no less. The van is full, so we squeeze as many of us as will fit into the front and anyone without a seat lies themselves flat across the stolen goods in the back. This serves the dual roles of keeping everything in place and acting as a look out from the rear window. We park the van down the back of a side street behind some garages and head off in different directions. Our night time criminality is complete.
We have successfully nicked 26 pallets from the back of B&Q.
The use of The Satellite Club had lasted only briefly, it not being possible to hide the fact that regular crowds of 300 people were turning up every two weeks to watch incredibly loud live music in a hall with no sound proofing in the middle of a residential area. There was also the not insignificant challenge that our very ebullient and convivial host had failed to mention that despite him selling terrific amounts of it, the hall did not, as we imagined, actually have an alcohol licence. This discovery led to a brief attempt to pretend that everyone attending was a member of a special club, meaning it was a Private Members Event, in turn resulting in no need for a licence. There were fake membership cards meaning, naturally, that the club had needed a name - The Rumble Club, so called because trains used to pass by and it made the prefabricated walls shake. Regular Police visits had convinced everyone that it couldn’t go on much longer, and the Rumble Club had become a nomad project; a wildly enthusiastic gathering of music fans with no fixed abode. It would pop up in any location that would have us, normally not lasting longer than it took the hall owner to work out what it was we were up to. Finally it had found a slightly more permanent home out the back of the Hand & Sceptre in Southborough in a room which normally serviced weddings, christenings and bar mitzvah.
This hall had no infrastructure at all. No stage, no PA, no lights. The only way it could host gigs was to start the process of building what we needed at about 10am on the day of the show, then taking it all down again some 14 hours later. I think it’s very important to repeat this point; this hall literally had nothing whatsoever in it which would suggest it could host a live music event - specifically it had one electrical socket so that was going to be a bit of a challenge for start.
Our stupidly optimistic approach to overcoming the obstacle of it being a completely unusable space involves starting to put together what we need to build the event at 2am when you can find us driving around Tunbridge Wells in a darkened van looking for pallets to build a stage out of. After some experimentation, we have worked out that a construction two pallets deep and three pallets wide is an achievable stage size you can expect to get most bands on, and stacking those pallets three high means there’s a vague chance you can see the top of the singer’s head if you’re standing at the back. The whole construction is then covered with a piece of carpet that we found out the back of a pub that was being closed down. We don’t have anywhere to store this makeshift stage covering, so we’ve taken to throwing it over the back of garden at the rear of the venue and then retrieving it two weeks later for the next show. Over a period of months our stage begins to take on the distinctive odour of a particularly mossy forest after heavy rainfall.
We’ve also worked out that if we cram a splitter block into another splitter block and stick that into another one, then glue all three of them together with half a roll of gaffa tape, ram the whole thing into the single electrical socket and attach 4 blocks to each of the 5 available sockets this creates, we then have enough power sockets to plug everything in. The resulting contraption has to be balanced on a beer crate and hidden behind a box to stop people bumping into it. We have heard of both the words ‘safety’ and ‘health’. We have not, however, decided to put them in the same sentence.
The PA and Lights we hire from our erstwhile friend the Music Store Owner, who doesn’t have a music store any more; having to open the doors to it every day was seriously interfering with his constant holidaying in Lanzarote. However he does have all the things that used to be in it stuffed precariously into a garage near his house. Having built the stage and the electrical grid by 11am, we drive round to his Aladdin’s cave of a lock up and get our hands on whatever he has lying about that we can make a sound system out of. Sometimes this will be actual speakers and microphones designed to do the job of allowing audiences to hear the bands playing, but often it will be whatever is left after other people who know what they are doing have hired all the proper stuff. Our PA system frequently looks like a junk shop version of the famous Wall of Sound constructed by the Grateful Dead only held together by sellotape and imagination. Our lighting ‘rig’ follows a similar protocol of ‘what’s left’. Sometimes this is three full sets of flying par-cans, some floor mounted strobe lights, a smoke machine and an early model of something that looks a little bit like a laser. Other times it’s three light bulbs, one blue, one red, one green, housed in a black box that helpfully steps forward in time with the bass drum. If there isn’t a bass drum, this means someone has to stand near it whispering ‘boom’ every so often to trigger its internal mic sensor. One night the red bulb blew out and the sequence went Blue, Darkness, Green, Blue, Darkness, Green for the rest of the evening.
We have acquired other weird bits of ephemera along the way, some of which actually works and other bits that just look nice. Once we’ve built the stage and added whatever PA and Lights we’ve laid our hands on, we fill the back of the stage with various amps someone left behind or bits of drum-kit that got broken somewhere. Overall our stage set up looks like Mad Max Thunderdome as re-imagined by Blue Peter.
By 3pm all this is in place at the rear of the room and bands begin to arrive. Now at this point you’re probably thinking ‘what sort of band is going to agree to play on 24 pallets held together by a rain soaked carpet through a PA made out of sticky tape while Blue and Green lights flash on and off?’ So I’m going to tell you. The Flatmates. The Chesterfields. The Pop Guns. In case you are thinking a theme is emerging and its name is Bristol, also Swervedriver. And Lush. The shoe-gazing original version of themselves, not the ‘wait, we have written some songs now’ version that would later crash accidentally into Britpop where they looked deeply uncomfortable. They complained that there wasn’t enough smoke and people would be able to see them, it being one of those nights where we had managed to extract more than just a single black box of lights from the back of the lock up.
If this all sounds tremendously unlikely, it was. It would be wrong to say that these were the first ever proper gigs to take place in Tunbridge Wells. Not even close. Bands and little local scenes had been popping up since the early 1960s, and the town had even produced one totally verified and hugely successful notorious punk act led by The Punk Singer. But this was something different. Consistent, building towards something, regular events, starting to put the place on the map. It was characterised by an ever-growing crowd of people, producing lots of pop up bands, its own fanzine and even the odd vinyl pressing or two. From a worthy history of sporadic gigs in village halls (Groombridge, Lamberhurst, Crowborough) and a touring circuit of odd pubs in odd places with odd demands (Two sets on a Monday night at The George in Tonbridge, the increasingly dangerous basement of The Flute & Flypaper - legal capacity about 35, average number of people in it about 200 - The Six Bells in Chiddingly where I was once shouted at by a large gang of heavily armed motorcycle enthusiasts to ‘just play the f**king endings’) over a period of about two years Tunbridge Wells gradually became an epicentre of music in the region. Bands started to leave there and go and play in other towns. Agents would phone random people up and ask who was booking the events. This all happened because a gang of people gathered around the idea that nothing was ever going to happen in a place like Tunbridge Wells unless people got off their arses and made it happen. Which brings me to point 2 of the purpose of this book:
People who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of the people doing it
This is a grand sounding, bold and inspiring statement that has a tendency to disguise what it means when you practically see it in action. People said it wasn’t possible to create such a scene in a town like ours. People said you couldn’t just create a club out of nothing. People would look at the empty shell of a room and tell us you can’t put a gig on there. People would be absolutely confident that no bands would come and no audience would turn up, and they’d still insist on telling us it wouldn’t work as hundreds of people filled up the events. The same people would even stay on late into the night so they could be there tutting at our stupidity as we bundled the pallets back into the van at 1am and drove them back down to B&Q. Then we would throw them back over the fence until two weeks later when we would break in and steal them once more and do it all again. Sorry B&Q. I’m sure you’ve been wondering for years who was making all that mess in the backyard out of your pallets. It was us.
We were the people doing it.
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