'At The Hop', A Step In The Right Direction', 'Toe The Line' etc etc

Saturday 21st January at midday, in seat 9F on Eurowings flight 4U9467 at Heathrow Airport awaiting take off 

Well. Here we are again. Indeed here we go again, this time to Dortmund via Dusseldorf Airport for a Ruts DC show at The Ruhrpott Ska Explosion Festival. No, I'm not too sure what we're doing at a ska festival either.
It seems strange to think of flying to gigs as 'routine' - which is why I don't think of it as that or anything like it. There's still something exciting about it, even though I've done it a fair few times over the years. I really must grow up one day - then again I've got this far, so maybe not? 
I broke a toe this week. Silly me. Then again I didn't do it deliberately... I guess that at this point there should be some crazy rock 'n' roll story attached to the incident ('there I was in a New York hotel having a drink with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood when Iggy Pop suggested that I swung from one of the chandeliers. I wouldn't have normally but gripped by the spirit of Keith Moon I though that I'd give it a go...') but no - I somehow caught my foot on a table leg in the front room. Gawd knows how - serves me right for not wearing shoes or indeed (gulp!) slippers eh? It hurt a lot when I did it on Thursday but it hurts a bit less now - then again I have taken some industrial strength Ibuprofen, as advised by the chemist that I hopped in to see not long after the frankly ridiculous table leg / toe equation took place. They also advised me to tape it to an adjacent toe (it's the one next to my little toe on my left foot) and to 'take it easy for a week or so'... as I limped my way towards gate A24 30-odd minutes ago I reflected upon how much we all take 'normality', or whatever 'normality' is in our world, for granted. Without wishing to tempt fate I, like most of us, am lucky enough to be reasonably healthy most of the time - and yet we all moan about the most trivial of things don't we? Well, we do don't we? 
I suppose that last night was a chance to 'take it easy' - so I of course went out to see a Led Zeppelin tribute band at Tropic At Ruislip. Led Zeppelin are revered both as a band and as individuals for a reason, and Hats Off To Led Zeppelin made a very good job of what is some notoriously difficult material - their two set show saw a good selection from the catalogue (finishing the main set with 'Wearing And Tearing' really was a moment for the diehards!) with the obvious classics getting the biggest audience reaction. A good night all round - I'd not been to the club for a while and it was splendid to see it continuing to thrive in these difficult times. 

Right - it looks as though it's take off time so I'm going to try to have a snooze. It's bloomin' tiring having a broken toe. Maybe I should have had a quiet night after all?

Sunday 22nd January at 2.25 pm, in seat 12D on Eurowings flight EW1466 at Dusseldorf Airport awaiting take off

Strange. Very Strange. Well, I think that it is. 
While I'm away doing these crazy jaunts around the rock 'n' roll world I usually take an iPod with me, along with a little battery operated device to play it through; this means that if I get my own room I can use it to play whatever peculiar song has somehow found it's way into my warped mind while I'm attempting to get some sleep. 

('But Leigh' - I hear you cry - 'what of the women? The drink? The drugs? The wilful destruction of hotel rooms? Whatever happened to the spirit of Keith Moon from earlier?' Good question...) 

Anyway last night - oh ok then, very early this morning - I thought I'd play a bit of, wait for it, Eddie and The Hot Rods. Oh it won't work. Flat battery. Very annoying, and strange since I charged it up yesterday. And for some reason it won't charge up now. Bugger!
That's the strange bit, but not the very strange bit. That's coming in a minute.
So I played a song or two on my phone before eventually getting tired enough to get to sleep. Good. After a while I woke up and, since it was dark I attempted to switch my phone on to check the time, like we all do these days. Well, we do don't we? It didn't work. Turn the bedside light on. Try again. Nothing.The battery was as dead as the proverbial dodo. But it was over 70% charged when I went to sleep. Weird. I was of course immediately wide awake, gripped with terror with the hideous realisation that there was obviously an enormous magnetic field (or something) in the hotel that was causing every battery in the building to go flat and so no one's alarm would go off and we'd all be there forever. Or something. A very strange moment- well that's how it felt at the time.

We'd arrived a Dortmund Airport after a pleasingly uneventful flight, and were met by Tony who drove us (at quite a speed, it must be said) to the venue where preparations for the evening were well under way. After checking the drums and amps we were all set to go to our hotel, but with our stage time less than two hours away we decided to stay at the venue. This proved to be a good move as it gave us chance to get something to eat and drink as well as to meet the other bands on the bill. 
Showtime was 7.15 - with things already running late (an unusual situation at events such as this) there was an unwelcome urgency in setting up which caused the odd fraught moment but we go there in the end.
Remember my broken toe? I'd almost forgotten about it too until a few songs into our show when I bought my foot down onto the stage just a little bit too hard - In a split second a heavy metal bolt of pain shot up my leg and out through the top of my head. I remembered it then. Absolute agony. The resulting, er, jazz chord hadn't appeared in 'Vox Teardrop' before, and I for one hope that it doesn't appear again - although a similar one turned up later in 'Psychic Attack' for the same reason. Argh! If you see these performances on YouTube then please cut me a little slack... having collectively wondered what on Earth we were doing at a ska festival we all reached the conclusion 'doing rather well' by the end of our set. A great gig, and it must be said a great evening all round. All the bands played well although I must give a special mention to The Valkarians who were simply brilliant. By the time headliner Roy Ellis hit the stage we were all flagging a bit (well I certainly was!) so we headed for our hotel during his set, but we all agreed that it had been a splendid event to be part of. 
With no more Ruts DC shows for a month or so it's now time to prepare for the Stranglers tour in March which should, to coin a phrase, be something to write home about - which if you think about it, is exactly what I'm likely to do here...    

Tuesday 24th January at 4.27 pm, back in Blighty and at home 

So there you have it - some great gigs and some (hopefully) interesting times. I thought that it might be fun to structure successive posts in a similar manner. There has been minimal editing - they really were written in the places and at the listed times, and this is reflected in the writing, which is sometimes scrappy but often oddly revealing. All good stuff!

Five alive

...and as predicted last time that was indeed a very busy few days :-

I arrived at the Air Serbia check-in at Heathrow Airport about 15 minutes early for our allotted meeting time of 11.30am on Friday morning. After meeting up with Dave, Segs and Nick (Molara was on her way) and checking in Segs and myself took our instruments to outsize baggage then joined Dave and Nick to go through security. Despite taking off my watch and emptying my pockets I still managed to set the alarm off - I was eventually allowed through after removing my shoes and standing in another (presumably more elaborate?) scanner. With a while to go until we were due to leave we got some food, after which I decided to look for an iPod in the duty free shops. I somehow managed to lose mine a while back and have been looking around for a new one ever since, I suppose I always hope to find a bargain but always end up thinking something like 'well, they're the same price as on Amazon so maybe I should just buy one from there?' Mind you, then I'd have nothing to do at airports...
Our flight was full, and got off to an entertaining start as the chap doing the safety announcements clearly had a rather dry sense of humour - 'In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure an oxygen mask will magically appear in front of you. When you have stopped screaming place it over your face'... he finished with 'if you have been listening to this announcement then I wish you a good flight, if you haven't then I wish you good luck' to the amusement of those who (presumably) had been listening.
We landed at Belgrade Airport just after 5 o'clock. I'd not been to Serbia before and so was hoping to see a bit of the country during our journey to our gig; since our driver chose to take the smaller (and therefore bumpier) roads to Novi Sad rather than the motorways we saw more of the countryside than we otherwise might have. Along the way we stopped at a shop (don't ask me where it was!) where Pardon crackers and Jalen beer was purchased, to the general approval of all concerned. On arriving at The Hotel Putnick (where I'm sharing room 415 with Nick) we met Igor the promoter and dropped some of our stuff off before walking around the corner (literally!) to the venue, a large open air stage in the town square. As Dave checked the drum kit over and I was shown the Marshall JCM 900 provided for my use 'Plan 9 Channel 7' by The Damned played over the PA system - a good sign for the evening ahead.
After eating in a nearby bar I walked back out into the town square - the first band were on and thousands - literally thousands - of people had arrived to watch the show. This was going to be good. I went back to the hotel to get changed and to write out some set lists - by the time I'd done that it was time for us to get set up. As I was plugging my pedal board in Segs asked me if I had a spare guitar lead ('I don't think mine is working') which fortunately I was able to give him; after what felt like only a few minutes we were on and into 'Whatever We Do'. My amp sounded great, in fact everything sounded great, and a potentially classic show is in prospect. It certainly had the makings of that - until during 'Something That I Said' when some worrying buzzing and crackling sounds started to come from Segs's side of the stage. We start 'Mighty Soldier' and everything seems to be ok - until the bass cuts out completely - Segs fiddles with his lead (my lead!) and it comes back on, goes off again... he's given another lead but the same thing happens so it must be the jack socket on his bass. Bugger! Can anyone lend us a bass please? After what felt like ages (but what according to Nick behind the sound desk was actually no time at all) a bass guitar is found - but it's a 5-string model, and Segs has never played one before. He introduces 'Jah War' and then realises that it's got one of the most prominent bass lines in the show - 'let's play it anyway' says he with a smile, and halfway through the first verse the guitar strap comes off and he just catches the instrument before it hits the ground. Oooo! By now we're running short of time so it's straight to the last two songs of the set - 'Staring At The Rude Boys' and 'Babylon's Burning' cause a near-riot and a breathless (and at one point bass-less!) 'Society' close our show. As we walk off some of the crowd are singing 'In A Rut' - oh well, that'll have to wait until next time... as Segs stands at the side of the stage ruefully eyeing his bass he looks at me and smiles - 'you have to laugh don't you?' Yes, I suppose that you do... Dave and Segs went off to do a television interview (The Ruts played in the-then Yugoslavia back in 1980 and there was a lot of interest in their return) while I took my guitar and pedals back to our hotel before joining the others for a drink. Before long liberal application of Lowenbrau along with a plum brandy called Slivovitz have easily banished any possible negative thoughts about our performance - and why not? It really was great to be able to come over to play, and while the technical difficulties made it a difficult gigs in some ways it was also a good one as the audience's reaction proved. Well, I enjoyed it!

Saturday began with (you've guessed it!) a headache. That Slivovitz is strong stuff... I managed to get a bit of breakfast (it finished at 10 o'clock, I got there just before they started clearing it all away) before going back to the room for a shower and (you've guessed it again!) going back to sleep. I did however remember to set an alarm, and so Nick and myself were downstairs in the lobby for our midday rendezvous with Igor who thanked us warmly for coming over and playing before putting us in a taxi to take us back to the airport which this time took a more direct route. Annoyingly our aircraft then sat on the tarmac for over an hour before eventually taking off at quarter past four - no wacky announcements this time, just the rather ominous prediction of turbulence throughout our journey. This fortunately proved to be mostly unfounded, although the pilot did say that he was expecting 'a bumpy landing' as we approached Heathrow - it could have been better, but it could have been a whole lot worse! No time to worry about that now though - my cab got me home for just before 7.30 and I had to be back out an hour-and-a-half later. Oh well - I guess that's why God gave us takeaway food...
I arrived in The West End just after 10 o'clock - it was raining but the streets were still crowded, and the walk from Tottenham Court Road station to The 12 Bar Club took longer than perhaps it should have. Then again, maybe I was flagging a bit? Either way I arrived just in time to catch the last song by The Legendary Groovymen before saying hello to Chris Pope's bass player Mic who was celebrating his birthday by playing with both Pope and a new band called (wait for it!) The London Sewage Company, who feature him and Ken the drummer from Pope alongside 12 Bar Club manager Mark a.k.a Barnet on vocals and their mate Pete and your humble narrator on guitars. Mark asked me if I'd be interested in doing the show the while back, and emailed me a few of the songs he and Mic had been working on - when I heard the first song 'Bridget' start with the line 'he's in love with a cross-dressing midget' (I bet you can guess what that line rhymes with!) I got on the phone straightaway to put myself up for the job. Well, wouldn't you have? We're on later but in the meantime Chris Pope and co. played a storming set in front of a very enthusiastic audience - the band seem to sound better and better each time I see them, which admittedly has been rather a lot recently! There's a while before we're due on - the place is very full, and with a couple of other birthdays in the house it looks like we should be in for a good debut gig. We kick off with 'Night Of A Thousand Beards' (this band really does have some very, er, 'interesting' lyrics!) and I realise that although the rest of them had rehearsed together the previous day I'd only had a brief run through with them a few weeks ago. Ah well, 'in for a penny' as the old saying goes... 30-odd minutes later we all agree that our debut had gone well - after all, we did get to play 'Bridget' twice which I think you'll agree constitutes a good gig by anyone's standards.

By the time Sunday afternoon's Big Al Reed and The Blistering Buicks gig at Ye Olde George in Colnbrook came around I was feeling tired. Very tired. I'd got in well after 4am and hadn't managed to sleep for anywhere near long enough, and as a result I personally don't think I played too well although nobody else seemed to think that there were any problems (or if they did then they didn't tell me!) The band had played a long show the night before and as a result were all on top form so maybe I was just feeling a bit 'left behind' or something? Anyway it had been a great weekend, which I managed to all-but-ruin for myself by going to The Three Wishes in Edgware for the first time in ages - I though it might have been good fun to go to the regular Monday jam night, but as has occasionally happened at these events there was more than one unpleasant moment of spitefulness from someone who really ought to know better. While I'm not going to let this sour a memorable few days, I really must get around to writing a piece about jam nights one day... 

Deptford fun city

Behold the above photo of Room 2 at The Music Complex in Deptford. This is a very good rehearsal studio, which is just as well as I'm likely to be spending rather a lot of time there over the next few weeks. I took the picture early on Wednesday afternoon during a break in a Ruts D.C. rehearsal, when Dave, Segs, Seamus and myself (Molara was sadly unavailable) ran through most of the material played at last year's Alabama 3 support shows as well as several potential additions to the set. Their 1981 album 'Animal Now' is about to be re-issued, and there have been any number of requests for older Ruts songs so the song choices reflected this - I won't ruin it for you millions of fans that are reading this (I wish!) but suffice to say that you hopefully won't be disappointed if you catch one of the upcoming gigs. 
Talking of photos the excellent Stupefaction blog has posted these wonderful images of Ruts D.C. way back in the early 1980s. I remember them looking like that! That was over 30 years ago - amazing. And talking of blogging Adrian at Aural Sculptors has reviewed the 'Rhythm Collision Volume 2' sampler CD - it's a very good review (I wouldn't have put a link to it if it wasn't!) as you can read here. Excellent!


I'd expected to be back in Deptford today for a Cool Britannia rehearsal in anticipation of our first show at The Lights Theatre in Andover tomorrow night, but late on Tuesday afternoon the news came that the show had been rescheduled to Wednesday 18th July. Much consternation (and a fair bit of swearing) among the band members followed, as well as speculation along the lines of 'if this has happened now how many other venues are going to do the same thing?' Not good frankly - let's see what happens next.


On a lighter note, The Upper Cut (and after probably far too much debate we've finally decided that it's two words - The Upper Cut rather than The Uppercut) now have their own website which you can see here - more egotism and shameless self publicity! It's been good fun to put together, and if nothing else doing this and my website have given me chance to get to grips with the iWeb facility on my MacBook. I suspect that like my iPhone and iPod I only use a small amount of the clever things that it can do, but have a look and see what you think. Hmm... I use a lot of those i-related thingies don't I? 


And I've just heard from my old Blue Five bandmate (should that be 'duo-mate' as there was only two of us? Answers on a postcard please, usual address) Pete a.k.a. Voltarol whose always-excellent blog has been very quiet of late. It seems that he's been putting his online energies into Facebook (weirdo! - although I guess I really should get myself on there sometime...) and has sent me the links to pages for two bands that he's currently involved with - Silvia Nicolatto and the Anglo Cornish Project and Que Belo Castelo. All good stuff, but I for one miss the Voltarol of old. Come on Pete - get back on the blog!


Right - with an unexpected day at home it's time to plug the guitar in and play. Yeah, I know I could do something sensible like tidy up, but Shirley's out at work and I've got songs to practice. Hope the neighbours aren't in...

Ships in the night

This posting was written more-or-less as soon as I arrived home, and it's somewhat disjointed structure reflects my tiredness at the time. I've thought about re-writing it but it seems to sum the previous 2 days up for me. See what you think...

Arriving at an airport at 6.45 on a Wednesday morning isn't always an enjoyable thing to do; on this occasion it wasn't too painful, and as I picked my way through several gangs of holidaying lads I half expected them all to wearing t-shirts that we'd printed in the shop. (We've been doing rather a lot of that lately!) I was just paying a small fortune for a thimble full of coffee and a plastic croissant from The Stansted Landslide (that's what it said it was called on the till, honest! You may know it better as this...) when a text message arrived from Pete - 'How are you doing mate?' was the cheery question; my reply of 'bored, tired, fed up - usual Wednesday morning, except I'm at Stansted Airport' seemed to go down well. I was sat attempting to drink coffee that was hotter than the surface of the sun when Pete, his wife Jayne and P.R. man Paul arrived. When we checked in with B.M.I. Baby I received the surprising news that I was allowed to carry my guitar on to the aircraft as hand luggage. I don't recall ever being able to do that before, although it may have had something to do with the fact that there were only 30 or so people on the flight. The flight to Belfast passed quickly due in no small part to the latest copy of 'Vive Le Rock!' magazine, and it was strange to walk straight out through arrivals without having to look for outsize baggage. A short taxi ride later we were checking in at The Stormont Hotel - I'm sharing room 234 with Matt who's arrived on another flight, and we've got everything from Them Crooked Vultures and Howlin' Wolf playing on the iPod dock in our room before very long. We're here for a showcase performance of 'White Star', a new musical based on the story of The Titanic. Pete and Paul are involved in promoting this and another show called 'Celtic Dreams' which is also being showcased at the same event at The Andrews Memorial Hall in nearby Comber. The music for the show has been written by Sam Davidson and John Wilson, both of whom play in the reformed version of Rory Gallagher's old band Taste. (John is the original drummer in the band.) I met Sam when we played in Belfast a couple of years ago (click here for the story) and had been given some demo recordings to learn the songs from as well as talking to him a couple of times on the phone. I spent much of the afternoon with Sam at Holywood Studios (which he and John run) going through the multi-track recording of 'The Road To Paradise' deciding which guitar parts we would play live and which ones would be left on the backing track. He also played me some recent Taste recordings - they're about to change their name to WMD and release a new album which judging by what I heard should be well worth hearing.

After returning to the hotel and catching up on some phone calls we all went to The Ganges Indian restaurant in Holywood where my vegetable masala was both very red and very nice. Myself and Matt then spent a couple of hours in the hotel bar (oh yes!) before retiring to our room for some cans of lager (Matt bought them earlier - good boy!) and to watch an excellent live set from Beady Eye on the television.

Hay fever meant that I woke up on Thursday morning with sinus-induced deafness. Matt bellowing 'BREAKFAST FINISHES IN 15 MINUTES!' finally got through to me and a stumble down to the restaurant more-or-less woke me up. A lazy morning followed (good!) with punk rock on the iPod and tennis on the telly before Walter the driver took Matt and myself to The Andrews Memorial Hall for our allotted 3 o'clock arrival time. As we arrived 'Celtic Dreams' were running through their part of the evening so I walked down to the shops to get something to eat. Back at the venue everything's set up and ready to go - we're D.I.-ing into the P.A. rather than using amplifiers and after a couple of run throughs 'The Road To Paradise' is sounding good.

The evening's event lasted about an hour; I was on stage for around 4 minutes, by far the shortest performance I've ever been part of. Pete gave a short introduction during which he referred to the show as 'Maiden Voyage' - looks like he's changed the title? - before leaving the stage. He walks past us with the words 'listen out for the seagulls'; on our cue we walk out on to the stage, pick up our instruments and await the start of the track. As it begins we exchange anxious looks when we realise that our guitars aren't audible - they finally come on during the second verse to our collective relief. Our harmonised solo goes well, and then suddenly the song is over and we've completed our part of proceedings. As we walk around to the front of the hall we smile and shake hands - it went well. Good. With an audience largely consisting of potential investors it was a night to give a good performance, and from what I saw and heard everyone did.

Back at our hotel there's food and drink a-plenty; I'm given a bowl of something that's supposed to be a vegetarian meal although it looks and smells a bit fishy (literally!) to me. I end up with a few roast potatoes, a dollop of coleslaw and, since there's no cutlery left, a teaspoon. Sitting in a roomful of millionaires (well, that's what I decided that they were!) I felt angry, sad, depressed - eventually I retired hurt to room 234 where Pete came and found me, asking if I was alright, looking really worried... yes I'm alright, just want to be on my own for a while. I laid on the bed gazing absentmindedly at an episode of 'The Mentalist' on the T.V. - I reflected on the previous day or so, mostly spent in a very expensive hotel for a few minutes on stage followed by a plate of lukewarm spuds. What was all that about? And why hadn't I noticed how good looking the woman that plays the head detective in 'The Mentalist' is before now?

Matt arrived back in the room and snapped me out of my introspection with the suggestion that we go for a drink. Good man.

As I fought to switch my alarm off at 5.15 this morning I realised that it probably hadn't been a particularly good idea to finish working your way through several pints of Guinness less than 4 hours before you're due to leave for the airport to catch your flight home. Oh well. I shook myself awake and decided that with a flight this early it doesn't matter what time I'd gone to bed, I'd still be tired. Probably. We weren't quite so successful at getting my guitar to qualify as hand luggage this time, although that may have something to do with the flight being nearly full. One of the check-in girls tell me that they can walk it on for me and if there's a spare seat then it can go in that, otherwise it will have to go in the hold. Hmm... I once read somewhere that B.B. King always buys an airline ticket for his guitar in the name of Lucille King and sits next to it during the flight - when I was asked if I'd like to move from my seat in row 19 to sit next to my guitar in row 3 I jumped at the chance. Childish? Me? Yeah, right... as I fastened the seatbelt around it I thought about asking the stewardess to take a picture of me and my guitar for a laugh but instead contented myself with a bleary smile. It's a simple life sometimes.

Just before 8 a.m. I was back at The Stansted Landslide (why on Earth is it called that?!?) paying a small fortune for a thimble full of coffee and a plastic croissant; I then sat in the same seat that I'd been sitting in when I met up with Pete, Jayne and Paul just over 2 days earlier. And so it goes.

I got home just after 10 a.m. - I'll let you know what happens with the projected production of 'White Star' (or whatever it ends up being called) as soon as there's any news...

'Vinyl Rules!' Episode One - The Chairs

Proof (were it needed) that I've had far too much time on my hands this week comes with the news that I've bought myself one of those turntables that allows you to convert records into mp3's which you can then make into CD's, put on an iPod and probably do lots of other things with that I'm not clever or indeed young enough to know about. I've been thinking about getting one for a while, as there are quite a few records in my collection that are sadly unlikely to ever emerge on CD and this seemed to be an obvious way for me to transfer them across to the digital world. It's also a chance for me to re-discover some of these recordings, and in doing so it occurred to me that it would be fun to write about them here. So let's start with a band that could have been, and indeed were contenders - I refer of course to The Chairs.

I think I first saw The Chairs at the late and much-lamented Fulham Greyhound (well it's certainly lamented by me although I can't find much on the Internet about it!) sometime in 1988. I guess they were supporting someone but I can't for the life of me remember who, a fact which amply sums up the impact that they had on the evening. They were simply tremendous. I'd been a huge fan of much missed Medway magicians The Prisoners who I'd seen many times and who I always thought should have been massively successful, but here was a band who had all their best elements (great songs, loads of energy and a Hammond Organ that sounded like the loudest and therefore greatest thing on Earth) but who somehow seemed to be an altogether more commercial proposition. They looked good, sounded great and such was their overall brilliance that I somehow overcame my innate shyness and struck up a conversation with one of them, who directed me to their larger-than-life manager Jim - I left for home that night with a copy of their first single and a masterplan that somehow meant that The Chairs and The Price were somehow going to take over the World together. I may have been a little drunk...
The next morning (afternoon?!?) I played the single - the A-side 'The Likes Of You' was brilliant, the b-side 'Something's Happening' was if anything even better, and the band were clearly as wondrous as I'd decided they were the previous evening. By the time their second single came out (the magnificent 'Size 10 Girlfriend' / 'Cut 'n' Dried', probably my favourite of their releases) they'd established themselves as a popular live act and were in hot pursuit of a record contract. Over the next couple of years this became something of an obsession within the band, as there always seemed to be a label or labels interested but no one would bite the bullet and sign them. I remember singer / guitarist / songwriter Paul Sullivan once saying to me words to the effect of 'all that matters is us getting a record contract, we can work everything else out from there', which is a measure of how much it meant to him. Their third single 'Honey I Need A Girl Of A Different Stripe' / 'I Can't Say I'm Sorry' kept up the pressure, as did their live shows which continued to be superb although by their fourth and last single 'Crestfallen' / 'Sometimes It Takes A Hammer' I remember thinking that the atmosphere in the band had changed - the music was still excellent but the mood seemed somehow darker. And then, suddenly, they were gone, leaving just 4 singles and an almost limitless amount of potential that appeared to evaporate almost overnight. Paul went on to play with The Crowd Scene and The Liberty Takers as well as making some solo acoustic appearances but I'm not sure what he (or indeed the rest of the band and their mercurial manager Jim) gets up to these days. I hope they're all still involved in music, but in the meantime there are any number of unreleased songs that remain in the memory banks from live shows - 'Boys From Slumberland', 'Brave Little Soldier', 'All I Need To Know' (inspired by Albert Goldman's controversial book 'The Lives Of John Lennon' - Paul's a huge Lennon fan, and judging by this song is not too enthusiastic about the book) and 'Neck Of The Woods' among them as well as a cover of Elvis Costello's 'Beaten To The Punch', all doubtless destined to remain unheard unless a retrospective compilation magically appears.

Well I've made my compilation from the singles and I've hardly stopped playing it since - 20-odd years on they sound as great as ever. It's good when that happens. Sit on that music!