Take Five Girls - or - Will The Real Cat Please Stand Up

The image you see above cost me £6,500. Or about 10 Euros. Or maybe it saved me a fortune. Depends how you want to count it.

Sometime back in the 90s, I was in Antequerra, a very pleasant, not much touristed town in Andalusia. I'd just been made voluntarily redundant after years of trying and I was celebrating my windfall by driving around Spain and Portugal in a hire car for three weeks, on my own.

After two weeks, I'd had enough of moving to a new place every day so I stopped in Antequerra for a while and while I was exploring the back streets I found a shop selling some idiosyncratic and unusual tees. 

I bought several. They were all odd. I never saw any like them again, anywhere. The one I wore the most and for the longest wasn't the one with the five girls. It was this one:

I wore that t-shirt a lot. I'd probably still be wearing it now if Mrs. Bhagpuss hadn't finally told me she couldn't stand it.

I have no idea what Space Motion 570 is supposed to mean, let alone Union Feel The Heat, which is what the very faded yellow-on-white lettering says, in case you can't make it out. I always thought it might have something to do with basketball but chances are it doesn't actually mean anything. (There's a DJ now who goes by Space Motion but I doubt they were even born when I got this shirt.)

Although that was the one I wore the most, it wasn't my favorite. My favorite was the one with the five young women on the front. Unfortunately, that one was just a tad too small for me so I couldn't wear it as much as I'd have liked.

They fascinated me, those women. Who were they? They were obviously all friends. I thought they looked like they were probably about the age to be in college. Maybe they were school-friends who'd left and gone their separate ways and now they were back for the long summer break and catching up. (It's clearly summer where they are, based on how they're dressed.) 

I figured they probably wouldn't all have gone into further education. The one in the beret, though? She definitely had. And the cool one in the middle in the bee-stripe dress and RayBans. Maybe the girl in black and white checks and polka dots was a year or two younger. Just graduated from high school and getting ready to join the others at university. Hearing all the stories about what it was like.

The one in the sensible skirt, carrying the shopping and the one in blue checking out what's in the bag? Maybe they share an apartment. The two that didn't go away to study. Maybe they're working already, doing classes on day release. 

Actually, now I look again, they've all got bags. So maybe they've been on a shopping trip together.

And so on. This is what I found myself doing every time I looked at the shirt. Speculating about who they might be. Making up backstories for them all. Like I'm doing now.

In the end I gave them all names and wrote a short story about the five of them. As I remember, it wasn't a very good story. I don't think I was all that satisfied with it. But I wasn't so down on it I was going to keep it to myself. I published it in the APA.

And then I forgot about it for a quarter of a century until earlier this year, when I dug out all my old fiction and zines and started scanning and digitizing them. It took a lot of digging around in closets and under the bed and up in the loft but eventually I found almost everything I could remember - except that one story. And the T-shirt.

It was frustrating. Not just because there was a piece of my past missing. There are plenty of those. One more isn't going to matter. No, it was frustrating because one of the characters from the story turns up in another sequence of vignettes that I had found. Only now I didn't know who she was.

Late on in my time with the APA I started reviewing a very specific literary sub-genre. No, not a literary genre - a publishers' one. Books that compare themselves to Catcher in the Rye on their covers.

Publishers just love to try to make readers think a book is going to be like something else they've read. They're all scavengers, feeding on the kills of others. If anything ever sells they have no idea why but they're all sure if they copy the cover design they'll be able to sell a bunch more books to readers who clearly can't tell the difference. The same logic prevails with comparisons to other writers and other books.

Since Salinger was at the time my favorite writer and Catcher my favorite novel, two facts that may or may not still be true, I was prone to picking up copies of any books that claimed to be the same or similar. Not because I thought they would be. More to find out the ways in which they weren't.

Some were pretty good all the same and I wanted to share my thoughts on them. But I needed a framework. Because I was even more pretentious then than I am now and I never could just write anything straight.

Which was how I came up with the idea of having Phoebe Caulfield review the books that were supposedly like the one her brother was in, all those years ago. Or Phoebe Maybe, as I've just now realized I should have called her. Who knows if she really was Holden's sister? She never did find out who she was and so far neither have I. Not for sure.

My Phoebe lived in a rambling old house with a walled garden. It was based on the Quaker Meeting House where I used to go on Sundays as a child. It always spooked me out. 

Phoebe lived with ghosts. Her ghosts were other characters I'd written about. Or lived with. I lived with Cathy for years. She was my imaginary friend long after I was too old to have one. My imaginary imaginary friend. I think I was still at University when I last saw her although I wouldn't count on her not coming back some time.

There was Cathy from my past and Rachel and Sally from the proto-novel I was writing at the same time and then there was Cat. Cat was one of the women on the T-shirt. The only one whose name I remember and that only because she lives with Phoebe.

And now I was turning all of this into songs and I needed to know. Who Cat was. Which is how I came to be turning the house upside down, looking for that last, elusive, photocopied zine. And also the damn T-shirt!

So far, I still haven't found the story. I live in hope. It's impossible that I wouldn't have kept it. It's just that the house is full of paper. It could be between anything.

The shirt, though. That I found. Eventually.

But before I finally remembered where it was (In a small compartment tucked away under the lid of a blanket chest made by my great-grandfather, who I never met.) I went looking for it in the racking under the boiler that supplies the heat for the heating system in this house. Or used to.

It was in a cupboard whose doors probably hadn't been opened since the pandemic. The heating system was in place when we moved into this house and that was the best part of thirty years ago. It's never really been touched in all that time.

When I opened those doors to look for the shirt, what I saw was a disaster about to happen. The boiler was rusting away at the base. Bits of the pipework were starting to sag. When you have a house, there are some problems you can kick down the road to Spring or Next Year and some you have to deal with Now. This was one of those.

So we got it done. We have a brand new heating system. It's great and it's guaranteed for seven years with an annual service contract. We're good on that front for a while. It cost £6,500. 

Six grand, ten Euros or a small fortune. It's a good thing I needed to find that T-Shirt when I did. 

Now if I can just find the damn story. I still need to know just who Cat really is. 

So Very Real

Last night was a watershed moment for me. I finally ran out of things I wrote or recorded in the 70s, 80s and 90s that I could refashion or remake into new songs using AI. It's taken me more than six months, hacking away at the past a little more every day, but now it's clear cut and there's nothing left but stumps.

Well, okay, not exactly. I could give the longer pieces another pass or two. See if there's anything I missed. I didn't really pry all that much away from the longer of the two extended pieces of fiction because most of it seemed unsuitable for conversion into song lyrics but maybe a different musical genre would shake something else loose. Everything can't be sad dreampop.

And there might be the odd fragment I haven't found, left lurking somewhere in the house. I can think of a couple of pieces I remember writing that haven't turned up yet. One of them would be perfect. But if they still exist, I've run out of ideas on where to look. They weren't in the loft and that was my last hope.

Or maybe not. There are a couple of outside possibilities. I doubt very much that I'm likely to find any of the printed zines but I have a couple of PC floppy disks I haven't been able to read. If I could get into those... 

And before I got the PC in the mid-90s I'm pretty sure I wrote everything on my Amiga 500. Which I still have. And the disks. The problem there is that I'd need a CRT monitor to plug the Amiga into and I got rid of the last of those just after the pandemic, when I was having a clear-out. One more piece of evidence to support my belief that decluttering is never a good idea.

I was looking into it and it seems you can get various adapters to connect an Amiga to an HDMI display but my experience with such things in the past has not always been great and honestly I don't think I can be bothered. If I'm honest, I don't even want to dig the Amiga out from the inaccessible hidey-hole I buried it in when I was almost sure I'd never want to use it again...

No, I think I'm just going to have to accept that those last, few fragments are gone for good. And that's okay. I've recovered and restored a huge percentage of everything I ever did, most of which I thought I'd never see again and none of which I ever imagined would have such a scintillating afterlife.

It's been a revelation, rediscovering eveything I wrote and recorded decades ago, finding much of it was far better than I remembered and then turning it all into something new that's given me an extraordinary amount of pleasure and satisfaction in its own right. I think it's okay to let a few scraps fall through the floorboards.

There is another very good reason to call a halt to the crate-digging, too. If I don't have any more old stuff to rely on, I'll have to start making some new. That would be a whole different adventure, wouldn't it?

I probably ought to start by finishing the pieces I left unfinished back around the turn of the millennium. One, supposedly a novel, I stopped mostly because I didn't know where to go with it next. The other, an episodic string of vignettes, left off, as I now realize, at a very unhappy moment in the story. Both of those deserve proper endings.

After that, maybe I might even come up with a new idea. That'd be the first this century. I don't believe I've had a new idea since the mid-90s. I'm assuming they still exist. It might be a myth.

New ideas are scary, though, and so is making art. Curating it is a lot more comfortable. Perhaps I'd have a better time organizing what I already have and figuring out some way to present it in public. Not that I have any illusions there's a public out there likely to take an interest but I figure it's better to offer it than not, even if there are no takers.

That's a thought that deserves some analysis, isn't it? Why does any creative act need to be shared? Surely the act of creation is sufficient in itself. And if an audience is required, I am it. I mean, I really appreciate my own work. In making it public, would I be sharing it in a spirit of benevolence, offering up something I feel is valuable and worthwhile for the pleasure and entertainment of others? Or would I just be looking for validation and applause?

Yeah, I don't really care much about all that introspective nonsense. Mostly, I'd like it on the web because that maximizes its chances of survival over a longer time-frame and I'm broadly of the opinion that things should persist whenever possible. Besides, someone might get some use or pleasure out of it one day. Also, it'd be really convenient for me to have it all in one place, even if that was actually several places, as in multiple blogs or websites, with the "one place" in that scenario being the collective wrapper of the internet.

As you may have realized by now, those who've stayed with me this far, this isn't so much a blog post as a conversation I'm having with myself as I try to decide what to do next. Coming to the end of the ongoing project I've been engaged with for most of this year has unsettled me a little and this is me, trying to think it through and figure out what comes next.

And do you know what comes next right now? You won't guess. I'll tell you. 

I'm going to go into the bedroom, open the door to the cupboard where the hot water tank is and rummage through the shelves beneath it, where I keep all the very old clothes I'm never going to wear again but haven't gotten as far as throwing out yet. I'm hoping that among them I'll find a T--shirt I bought in Antequerra about thirty years ago.

That T-shirt, which got too small and old to wear decades ago, has a cartoon on the front of five young women. They aren't characters from a comic or a movie or a show. They're just five people someone drew and presumably sold to someone else, who turned the image into a piece of clothing that ended up in a shop in a backstreet of a middle-sized town in Andalusia, where I found it and bought it for no reason other than I liked the look of the characters.

And then, later, I gave them all names and wrote a story about them. Which is one of the pieces that so far hasn't come to light. 

I don't really think seeing the image again will bring any of the names I gave them back to me. Except I already know what one of them is called because she turns up as a character in that series of vignettes I mentioned.

She's called Cat and I'm hoping if I can find the shirt I'll remember which of the five she is. So let me just go see if I can find it...

... and no, I can't. I have, however, discovered the hot water tank is rusting and needs to be replaced immediately, so that was... lucky?  

Also, a reminder that there are things more pressing in life than either writing blog posts or worrying about what happened to short stories you wrote half a lifetime ago. And with that I think I'll go do something useful for a change.  

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Just the music, which was created using Suno from a guide vocal uploaded by me. Actually, I whistled the tune. Mostly I sing them but some days my voice just isn't willing to co-operate and that apparently was one of those days. 

All the lyrics are mine, adapted from the penultimate paragraph, which reads as follows:

"Rachel sometimes does fireworks for us, just as it gets dark, and I help with the snow statues. If I feel lonely she'll hold me, if I ask. When I'm tired I go up to my little room and close the door. I think Rachel has a room somewhere, but I've never seen it, Rachel is very real. Perhaps she's the real one, not me. Cat and Cathy, I don't know where they go. They're ghosts."

As you can see, I didn't change much, just added some emphasis and extra poignancy. I've found the two techniques that work best for turning prose into lyrics are either to add a few rhymes or to use repetition. It's amazing how effectively repeated lines and phrases substitute for rhymes.

I ran lots of variations and fiddled around with them but in the end, the best one was the very first run. It happens that way more often than you'd think. Suno sometimes seems to get worse the more you ask it to iterate. 

The prompt was

 "strings, cello, soft, sweet, low, husky female vocals, Gentle, soft, quiet, restrained, understated chamber-pop soundscape throughout, production very crisp and clear, female vocals low and husky but soft and sweet, Pitch is generally low, a somber quality indie-pop, dreampop fuzz-pop, simple subdued drums, quiet simple bass, quiet fuzzed guitars, strings"

Again, I find repeating things, particularly at the beginning and end of a prompt, helps a lot. It often seems as if Suno fixates on what it hears first, last or most often. 

If you want to hear it on Suno for some reason, it's here.  It's exactly the same though.

Always Save Your Stubs

For quite a few years now, I've had the fanciful idea of making a comprehensive list of all the live gigs I've been to and all the bands and solo acts I've seen. I don't know why. It's something to do, isn't it? And it'd be of interest to me if not to anybody else. 

A decade ago it would have been an extremely patchy record indeed. I'd have had to rely on my memory, which has never been good and only gets worse with age and time, plus any ephemera I might have lying around in the form of ticket stubs or concert programs.

I am a pack-rat by nature and inclination. One of my mantras, borne out of personal experience, is that I've never regretted holding on to anything but I've often regretted throwing something away. Present me can't pretend to know what future me will need, so why take the chance? Also, we have plenty of space. It's not like we have to crawl through tunnels of old newspapers to get to the fridge.

Even so, ticket-stubs were never something I held onto. Mostly I'd have chucked them in a bin on the way out of the hall or left them in a pocket to be thrown away later. 

I did keep a handful of stubs I thought had some significance, like the one from when the Who played Swansea FC's ground in 1976. That's still in the clutter on the mantlepiece in the front room, where I put it when we moved into this house thirty years ago, although ironically, that's a gig I have no trouble remembering without a small square of cardboard to prompt me.

As for programs, I stopped buying those quite soon after I started going to gigs. They were expensive. And anyway, you only ever saw them at concerts in actual concert halls. I started off going sse bands in big, formal venues like that but after the mid-70s, most of the bands I saw played in cellar clubs or the back rooms of pubs. No-one was selling program for any of that and it was all long before the time every last tiny indie band arrived at the venue with a wagon-load of "merch" to sell from a table by the doror.

A better record of what I'd seen would have been the ubiquitous fliers handed out before every gig by representatives of the venue, people running fanzines, members of other bands and anyone with some kind of event to promote. I knew people who collected those but I just used to take them, glance at them and drop them on the floor, like almost everybody else. I kinda wish I'd kept them all now, which proves the truth of my mantra, I suppose.

Apart from the odd item that somehow survives, like the satin scarf I bought outside the venue when I saw Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel at the Colston Hall in Bristol in 1975 ("Best Years of Our Lives" tour, supported by Sailor.), about the only concrete evidence that remains are the mentions I made in the apazines I published during the 'eighties and 'nineties and the letters I wrote to my then-girlfriend, now ex-wife, in my first year at university, when we were maintaining a long-distance relationship by post and payphone. 

She was kind enough to give me back my letters when we split up but I've never re-read them. They're in the loft, which is also where I'm hoping the rest of my apazines are. I might try to force myself through the tiny trap-door later today to see if I can find any of them. [Edit: I did and they weren't there. Then I turned the house upside down looking for them and finally found them safely tucked away in folders in a cupboard downstairs. Still, it was interesting to go in the loft again...] If I do find them, maybe I'll learn about other gigs I went to and immediately forgot, like the  Urusei Yatsura/Prolapse one I was talking about the other day.

Just as an example of how weirdly revealing that might be, I was looking through one of the zines I have been able to lay my hands on just yesterday, when I came across this statement as I looked back on my cultural year of 1997:

"I saw a few live acts - not as many as I should have, as usual. They can't have been that brilliant, 'cos I can't remember many. Unexpectedly best was certainly Ragga and the Jack Magic Orchestra..."

Who?! Seriously, who the fuck were they???

Man in the Moon 

 Ragga and the Jack Magic Orchestra

Them, apparently. Geez! That was the highlight of my whole year? No wonder I stopped going to gigs soon after.

I do now have the faintest recollection of seeing a band that reminded us a bit of Bjork, playing in the back room of a pub. I could not have told you what they were called, though, and I very definitely have no lasting memory of it beaing a... well, a memorable experience.

In the same 'zine I also mention going to see Pregnant, one of Gareth Sager's many, largely unsuccessful projects. I had no memory of that gig, either, although, as always, I do now, since the organic AI that runs all our memories has had the time to hallucinate one for me. 

I do at least remember the band, one of whose albums I own on CD. Gareth Sager, who used to be in the retoractively-seminal The Pop Group, moved through a number of excellent bands during the eighties and nineties, several of which I saw and all of which I rate pretty highly. Pregnant was perhaps the last of them I paid attention to, mostly because a year later I wasn't paying attention to music at all any more.

 

Moodmaster - Pregnant

That, as far as I can tell, is Pregnant's one and only appearance on YouTube and it's on Gareth Sager's own, extremely frugally stocked channel. He's put up precisely seven videos to represent his near-fifty year career. 

Pregnant were good, as I think the tune above proves, although not as good as Sager's other band with the same singer, Head. How good or bad Pregnant might have been isn't the point, though. The point is I saw them and I'd forgotten about it. I mean, I saw Head and never forgot about that and I didn't even like them at the time. (I came to love them later...)

I'm kinda curious to find out how many bands I can remember seeing and how many specific gigs I can nail down. Not for any reason much other than to have a list. I really like lists and this is one I've thought about making for years.

And it would be, if not easy, then at least easier than it would have been before various people far more obsessive about record-keeping than I started posting itenararies for their favorite bands online. It's still a very patchy record but it's something. That's how I can say with certainty that the Cockney Rebel gig I mentioned earlier took place on 23rd March 1975. Before I checked the web I knew it was the mid-70s but that was about all. (Also, just as an unecessary caveat against trusting our would-be AI overlords, even as I picked the correct link from the search results to find the exact date, Gemini's AI summary at the top of the screen was confidently informing me there was no record of any Cockney Rebel gig at the named venue during the given year...)

I thought I'd be on safer ground with the first gig I ever went to, which was Hawkwind. I remember quite a lot about that one, probably because a) it was my first and b) I was too young to get served at the bar so I was sober. Without looking anything up I would have said it was either 1972 or 1973 and I know it was at The Locarno in Bristol. The support bands were some German crew I don't remember the name of and Fat Mattress, the band Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience trucked around Britain with little success after Jimi died.

The German band, literally the first live rock group I ever saw, were dull and very easy to forget even a week later. Fat Mattress never showed up, their spot being taken by comedy-folk singer and local hero Fred Wedlock, a replacement that could only have made sense in his home-town. He went down a storm with the  hippies, space cadets and proto-metalheads that made up most of Hawkwind's regular audience. Hawkwind were thunderingly loud and as mesmeric as you'd expect from them in their pomp, it being the classic line-up with Lemmy on bass, Stacia dancing and Liquid Len doing the psychedelic light show.

Before I started this post, I tried to pin down the exact date. I knew the venue and the approximate year so I thought it would be easy enough. It turns out Hawkwind played the Locarno no fewer than three times in 1972-3, on 10 July and 19 November 1972 and then again on 28 June 1973. They were a hard-working bunch of hippies for sure, although throughout the seventies it was common for the same bands to play the same cities several times a year, often in the same venues. Nobody talked much about tour fatigue in those days, let alone considered cutting back on the dates for the sake of their mental health.

To figure out which of those three it was, I can triangulate with my second-ever gig, which I remember even more clearly. That was Yes at the Hippodrome in Bristol. They played the double-album Tales From Topographic Oceans, in its entirety, even though it hadn't yet been released. TFTO came out on 7 December 1973 and the gig I saw was on 18 November 1973. I can even tell you the setlist, thanks to this website, and I can bloody well remember it, well, now I see it!

• The Firebird Suite
• Close to the Edge
• Siberian Khatru
• And You and I
• Close to the Edge
• Tales from Topographic Oceans :
• The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)
• The Remembering (High the Memory)
• The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)
• Ritual (Nous sommes du soleil)
• Heart of the Sunrise
• Roundabout

As you can imagine, if you've ever heard any of their work, it was a very long evening. Don't take my word for it - here's a bootleg of the actual gig, from the start of Topographic Oceans to the end. That an hour and forty minutes and there was at least half an hour before that.

I sure as hell didn't go a whole year between my first and second gigs so the Hawkwind show I saw must have been on 28 June 1973. I would have been fifteen, which makes me a tad older than I've always thought. I went with my friend Pat, who'd certainly been going to see rock bands since he was twelve or thirteen. Having a Hell's Angel for an older brother will open those kinds of doors for you, I guess.

The upshot of all this is that it's a project that might take me a while but with which I could conceivably have some partial success and in the process Imight learn a thing or two about myself as well. Not least that I once had worse taste than I like to admit. (Not looking at you, Yes or Hawkwind. I'm still happy to include both of you in my CV. The Jack Magic Orchestra, though...)

If I do ever get around to putting the list together, you can rest assured it will end up here. So there's something to look forward to for all of us!

 

Notes About AI Used In This Post

The header image, generated at NightCafe using Google Imagen 4.0 Fast on default settings from a prompt using an exact quote from the post: "The German band, literally the first live rock group I ever saw, were dull and very easy to forget even a week later. "  

I was hoping for something a little more abstract but the first image was a black & white "photo" of some very dull-looking men. I then re-ran the prompt with "Line art, color, magazine illustration" appended and got the image used in the post. It was weirdly tinted yellow for some reason, though, so I ran it through Paint.net to turn it sepia. 

It's funny how the drummer doesn't have any sticks. 

 

Hello Tiger, Wherever You Are

I'm still digging through my archives (Read: unsorted piles of papers stuffed into cupboards, blanket trunks, suitcases under the bed and any shelf space not already fully occupied by comics and books.) in search of the zines I produced during the eighties and nineties. So far I've found... some of them.

How many there were and how many remain to be found is an open question. I can't remember when I joined BAPA although since I first met many of the people who later went on to be mainstays of the cult project while I was still at university and I graduated in 1981 or 1982 (You'd think I'd remember but I don't.) and I didn't quit the apa until pretty close to the millennium, I guess I must have been in it for more than a decade, possibly quite a lot more.

The mailing frequency was mainly, if not entirely, bi-monthly and I doubt I missed many mailings. I also frequently submitted more than one zine at a time so that suggests I must have produced somewhere between sixty and a hundred zines. So far I've found less than half the low end of that estimate. 

Given that I'm certain I'd never have knowingly disposed of any of them, they almost have to be somewhere in the house. My fear is that they're in the loft. I put a lot of stuff up there when we moved in, thirty years ago and I had trouble getting up there even then. Access is through a very small trap door in the ceiling of the bathroom and I haven't attempted it for about ten years. I'm not keen to try it now but I suppose at some point I'll have to.

But not today. Today I managed to find all nine issues of the other long-form fiction piece I was working on back in the nineties, which goes by the provisional title An Outside View. I also found a separate zine in which I go on at some length about how it's finished and the next stage is to submit it to publishers. 

All the covers. Not as well-preserved as the Final Line ones.

I don't sound at all keen and my estimate of my chances of attracting any kind of interest is highly pessimistic. In the end, I never did send it anywhere.

But... I do still have the revised, completed text on floppy disc and by some miracle the other day I managed to get Windows 10 to read that disc and copy it onto hard drive. That means I now have both of them digitized in a modern, useable format. One is 45,000 words and incomplete, the other 55,000 and done.

I've re-read the unfinished one and I love it. I thought it was great at the time and I'm very pleased to say that it completely stands up to both my memory of it and my original estimation. That said, the main reason I love it is because it's exactly the sort of prose I loved to read then and love to read now and judging by the careers of the authors I know who write that way, it is a niche market to say the least. 

The next step is to re-read the other one. The finished one. That one I was not all that happy with back when I wrote it so it'll be interesting to see if I like it any better now. I suspect I might.

Either way, I have no intention of reviving my plan to send it to anyone for consideration. That seems like very pre-millennial thinking. If I do anything, I'll either get it converted into an e-book or just host it online somewhere. No rush. It's waited three decades, it can wait a bit longer.

More interesting for the blog, today I found an old zine from the late '90s where I go on a bit about the prospects of doing exactly what I just mentioned, namely putting the work up online. That appears to have been a possibility I was considering even in 1998. 

I also speculate about the entire apa moving online and suggest I would prefer it if it did. Given my recent comments about what we've missed by moving away from the scissors and paste, that does seem like some heavy-handed ironic foreshadowing. 

I also came across some reviews of gigs I'd been to that I rather like. Four separate evenings out get the treatment and three of them I remember fairly clearly. One, though, I had absolutely no memory of whatsoever (Although it has come back to me a bit since reading the review.)

If you'd asked me if I'd ever seen Prolapse or Urusei Yatsura I'd have said I'd never even heard of either of them, far less seen them perform. Shows how much I know.

Hello Tiger - Urusei Yatsura

That's them. And that's the single of theirs I'd bought that made me think they were worth going to see live. It's pretty good, isn't it?

I guess we should take a look at Prolapse, too. Especially since - spoiler! - it seems I liked them better on the night. Hmm. And quite possibly still do.

And here's the proof. (Well, down there's the proof. Blogger didn't want to center it properly, so I had to move it. Never had that problem with Spray Mount.)

If the image is too small to read, never fear. It's embedded in the full text as transcribed the truly excellent Image To Text Converter. 

 
Prolapse/Urusei Yatsura - Bristol

I meant to see UY last year but didn't get round to it. I bought the sharp recent single, Hello Tiger, and thought I'd better make more of an effort. It was only a day or two before the gig that I realised Prolapse were supporting. I remember Andy Roberts talking them up and taking me to task for calling them "ordinary". By now I couldn't even remember what they sounded like.

There was a third band on the bill, Magoo, who I'd never heard of, so I reckoned I'd be safe getting there about nine. When I arrived the place was packed and there was a band on stage, nondescript, no singer. I guessed it would be Magoo and put them down as Mogwai wannabes. They finished the number (can't call an instrumental a song, can you?) and two singers walked on.

One, male, was tall, had out-of-control curly dark hair, looked raddled, old and maybe a little touched. He prowled and stalked and fiddled with the mike stand. The other, female, was small, blonde and picture-perfect. They began a fast, staccatto attack and didn't let up for half an hour. 

I liked them, then I liked them a lot. It was obvious who they were like. They were like the Fall, like the Beatnik Filmstars are like the Fall - a friendly Fall, one that doesn't take itself so very seriously. They were also not unlike the Gang of Four. The musicians were apparently from the same institute of higher education as the Replicants, while the male singer could have been the Replicants' singer's edgier, dissolute brother. Neither he nor the girl could sing, or, if they could, chose not to: Mostly, one would talk while the other shouted. It worked. The girl looked surrealistically pristine centre-stage, while her co-singer messed with her hair, put her in a headlock, tried to wind the microphone cord round her head. She looked pissed off, but didn't try to stop him.

Thirty minutes and they were gone. They were better than the Fall, last time I saw them. I wished they could have played longer.

A fast change-over and Urusei Yatsura push past me in the middle of the hall as they come to the stage from the back of the crowd. (Bands do this occasionally at the Fleece, but since most of them don't, I assume it's an affectation). They look like an indie band - there's a curly haired one, a lanky, limp-haired one, a dark-haired girl, a drummer. I'm looking forward to this...

After four numbers I'm seriously considering going home. They are pedestrian, unoriginal, dull. The limp-haired guitarist sings lead and he isn't very good. The songs plod. Even the band don't look interested. I decide to wait for the single, at least. Then the curly-haired guitarist takes lead vocals, and it's as if a different band has come on. Suddenly the air crackles with energy, the lyrics are clear and the guitars are electric. At the front, the crowd begins to move, to surge and leap. The lanky guitarist moves to backing vocals for the rest of the set and every song is fun again. The curly haired singer has a knack of sounding as though he's singing through a distortion pedal even though he's not.

People are stage diving and crowd-surfing which, in the Fleece, is near-suicidal. "We should be paying to watch you!" the lanky guitarist comments.

They end with a number where the curly guitarist jams a drumstick behind the strings and beats it with another until the strings snap. Then they exit swiftly through the audience, pushing past me again while the crowd goes wild.

No-one plays encores anymore, it seems.

And since I'm in a bit of a rush this evening, I'll leave it there for now. There may well be more from the archive, especially if I run short of ideas.