Back in the day, Bassbin and I hammered the final nail into the coffin that was our formal education by bunking off of the sixth form to decant to his mothers house in order to sample the forbidden pleasures of her drinks cabinet and air guitar to our spotty little hearts content to the new musical passion of our lives; New Wave.
It was 1978 and the new sound of the suburbs was being thrust at us by bands such as The Jam, The Undertones, Blondie, Eddie & the Hot Rods, The Stranglers and the Sex Pistols and we day dreamed that one day we would be producing our own two minute offerings of rock & roll paradise as with heads bowed in mock concentration and sincerity we crashed around the living room believing that we truly were, Paul Weller, Hugh Cornwall or Fergal Sharkey.
For us the much hallowed 8 minute anthems of Stairway to Heaven, Child in Time and Freebird were still held in kind regard but now much more in the vein that you esteem an elderly grandparent (“yes I know you fought in the war, but do you really have to go on about it EVEY time I see you”) and had been relegated to the song that signalled the end of the slow dances with our girlfriends during the Tuesday night Rock Shows at Tiffany’s.
In terms of our musical growth a song should now last no longer that 2 ½ minutes, 3 at the most and contain nothing that could be considered pretentious, educated or fantastic (14 minute epics about hobbits was totally out).
Now, our heads were full of the real poetry of youth; “Gordon is a Moron”; “He got an ice pick, that made his ears burn”; “Read the graffiti of a slashed seat affair”; “Teenage kicks are so hard to beat”; and of course this new found poetry had to bow to our teenage attention span and be nothing if not short!
This is something that has stuck with me and I have taken the philosophy of ‘Keep it real and keep it short’ with me into adulthood and my continued privilege to be able to perform in front of a live audience.
This very much came into play and certainly to our advantage a couple of nights ago at a popular Bristol venue called The Louisiana.
Now with most dedicated music venues these days it is policy to cram as many bands onto the night’s entertainment as you possibly can in order that you might generate a crowd.
The Louis is one of the more generous venues and only tends to put three bands on at once in the hope that each band brings at least 20 people, giving the business at least 60 paying customers through the door and about 15 band related members on top of that supping the local brew at 3 quid a pint.
Because of the number of people playing your actual performance time is restricted to strictly 30 minutes each (unless you are the headline, although we avoid that as we have noticed that the largest audience are to be found at the crossroads of the acts slap bang in the middle).
30 minutes does not give you a lot of time, especially for most of the bands we have witnessed in our 7 year history.
Normally the bands like a decent bit of ego worshipping during a song in the form of long lead guitar solos and then they like to pass the time of day by discussing the weather, cricket or who fancies who in between each number.
We have seen bands gets away with about 5 songs in total because they have spent too much time mucking about in between numbers.
I have a different philosophy. You can cram one heck of a lot of songs into 30 minutes if you keep them short and you don’t stop…..at all.
We went for it big time. No stops, no chance to sip water to refresh a frazzled larynx. No chance to mop perspiration soaked brows, no introductions or passing the time with the crowd.
No chance….1, 2, 3, 4 and we were off.
As I mentioned most bands manage 5 or if they are lucky 7 songs in their allotted time. We make 13, yup 13 songs and we didn’t go a minute over time.
The poor kids that had come to watch the headlining band of Artic Monkey Wanabies stood no chance. We frightened one poor girl to death with our ear splitting opening crash chord and then the onslaught.
Suddenly this group of 17 somethings were introduced to the experience their parents had had in their youths as the Punk Rock/New Wave has hit the scene and blew away the cobwebs of ‘disco’ and ‘middle of the road’.
And do you know what, they loved it.
Perhaps they felt some of the raw excitement I had felt as I pogo’d around Bassbins living room, or the sheer thrill of my very first live concert.
Maybe I did a little bit to introduce these kids to a new energy of music that is felt and lived every bit as much as it is heard.
Who knows, all I can say is that it is three days later I am still buzzing.
Incidentally, as an aside. The only member of our childhood Rock Stardom seeking triumvirate to make it through education and even onto university was Quick Sketch. He of course had to be the one that wrote a hit selling no 1 record, got the highest singles sales of the decade and he won TWO Ivor Novello awards. Somehow I think Bassbin and I might have got off at the wrong stop.
Just a thought!
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