Sunday 31st January 2010

A fairly grim pub gig last week. Drunks, bikers, loud women and drunk, loud biker women. Do you play any Black Sabbath songs? No, we don’t. Here’s the setlist. Look, no Black Sabbath songs. Not even ‘Paranoid’. There’s a Beatles one, and a Bowie one, and an R.E.M. one, and even (gasp) a Bad Company one – we loaded the setlist with pub grub in a vain attempt to please, and look where that got us. But really, we play our own songs. That’s what proper bands do.

Weird thing is, last time we played there, they loved us and wouldn’t let us go. But we’ve improved! We’ve got some good new songs, and we play the old ones even better! OK, so we don’t sound much like AC/DC, despite the penchant for black clothing. You knew that when you rebooked us. The Guns n’ Roses t-shirt I wore (with a degree of irony, admittedly) obviously didn’t convince. Sheesh.

Colin enjoyed it, though. He was temporarily deaf, and was thus free to bash away at a kit slightly larger than the space allotted to the entire band without the usual distractions which divert his attention from this important task – you know, listening to the singer or guitar or bass. (Joking!)

Thank God for the imminent Cheese and Grain gig, supporting Colin Blunstone, much-respected former Zombie, where we can reasonably expect people to listen.

Oh well. I’m off now to listen to a couple of classic albums from 1981 which, being too lazy to dig out the old vinyl, I’ve recently bought on CD. New Order’s Movement was their first album; on some tracks you can hear them growing into a new band, on others it’s very much Joy Division but with Bernard or Hooky singing, and never more so than on the sublime original 7” version of ‘Ceremony’ (NO’s first single, but actually a JD song). I was delighted to find that it’s on this expanded version of the album, as it seems to be hard to get hold of these days.

Also, Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call, the magisterial peak from which Simple Minds sadly gradually descended until they reached their shouty nadir as a poor man’s U2 at the end of the decade. Ony £3.98p on Amazon for these twin albums on one CD!

And what a great year 1981 was, with fine records by Echo and the Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs, the Comsat Angels, the Birthday Party, the Cure, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the Teardrop Explodes, Talking Heads, the Gang of Four, Kraftwerk, Siouxsie and the Banshees and doubtless others that escape me now. How did we get from there to the dismal idiot pop landscape of 1983 so quickly?

Sigh.

Russ