It had only been two and bit months since our last show, but it felt like an age. Suggy had taken over bass duties permanently (and Win had finally realised that he wasn't called Soggy/Saggy), and Mike had switched to rhythm guitar. We'd finished work on a couple of new songs written by Leigh, as well as writing our first song together as a band.
It was a fun time, but the dynamic of the band began to change with the new line-up and this caused us all sorts of problems, even if we didn't realise it back then. When we first started out, Leigh wrote all the songs and the rest of us did very little. We added an outro to "Running", but mostly we played the songs as they'd been written, with the odd guitar solo or drum fill here and there. We'd become a bit more 'musical' when Mike joined, with more complex bass lines, and an ever increasing number of lead guitar parts from me, but the songs still seemed to have a similar style. With Sug in the line up, the musicianship was ramped up a notch, but, by chance, his arrival coincided with a gradual loss of our musical coherency.
We'd all brought different influences to the table when we first started out, but the key bands were definitely Radiohead and Oasis. Although we only occasionally sounded like either of them, we all agreed that they were The Two. And Leigh wrote all the songs, so that obviously gave our earlier batch of tunes a further degree of consistency. By mid-1999 however, our influences were becoming increasingly disparate. Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, Joey Santiago of The Pixies and Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood were beginning to have a huge impact on my playing, while Mike was a big fan of technical guitarists such as Joe Satriani, who played four thousand notes a second in obscure scales. Winny was still listening to lots of rock and metal, while Sug's playing was a groovy cross between Paul McCartney, Mani and John Entwistle. We all liked The Charlatans, The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, but me, Mike and Sug in particular, were becoming much more slutty in our listening habits - sneaking off for illicit rendezvous with the likes of The Beastie Boys, Asian Dub Foundation, The Rolling Stones and Elastica.
Unfortunately this meant that our sets for the next year or so had a rather odd feel - jumping from style to style, with only a cursory grounding in the Radiohead/Madchester/Oasis axis. It was almost impossible to pigeonhole us... and not in a good way. We worked on four new songs in preparation for our début Cockpit gig: "Paracetamol" was a one minute long finger-picked Radiohead homage, which wouldn't have sounded out of place on 'OK Computer'. In contrast "Second Time Around" was a sweet, catchy, love song that sounded like a less bombastic cousin of "Angels" by Robbie Williams. "Party Politics" started life as a great little acoustic indie song, before it was transformed into a pseudo-metal track, with nasty slabs of dissonant guitar from me, and pounding drums from Win. And then there was "M.F.S.", the first track all five of us wrote together. HILARIOUSLY the song's name was an abbreviation of "Mike's Funky Song". It was vaguely 'baggy', and vaguely 'classic rock'. It was also sod all like any of our other songs. Oh. This initial lack of our own identity (common to lots of young bands to be fair), led to say-nothing words such as "eclectic" and "atmospheric" appearing in early reviews and as tag lines on John's gig posters.
With the show being an all-dayer, we arrived at the Cockpit around noon for soundcheck. We were all super excited. The stage felt enormous compared to the Duchess, and the empty room in front of us looked positively stadium-esque. The poster makes it look like there were two stages, but my recollection is that all the bands performed in the main room.
Anyway, soundcheck complete, we were accosted by Flatnose John. We'd been given tickets to sell, and he was keen to know how we'd got on. Balls. We'd brought lots of people with us to our first two shows for John, but, not only had a bit of the 'my mate's in a band' novelty worn off for some of our 'fans', it was also the end of term, which meant lots of my friends from uni had returned to their family homes for summer. And it was £5 in advance, which, even now, is a hell of a lot of money to see a bunch of local bands. I think we sold around 20 tickets, which was ok, but not quite the avalanche of sales John had excitedly braced himself for. I seem to remember that we ended up being asked to play much earlier than we were expecting as a result.
Even so we still had a lot of time to kill while the other bands finished their soundchecks and the first couple of groups opened the show. We'd been issued with backstage passes, giving us EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to our own dressing rooms, away from the hordes of baying fans and paparazzi. Surely these private chambers would contain an inexhaustible supply of Golden Virgins, frolicking in a Fountain Of Asses' Milk? Er.... well there was an empty fridge and a beer stained sofa. Boom.
My first ever backstage pass. Isn't she lovely?
We quickly tired of these luxurious surroundings and decided to venture into town for a few pre-gig beers. We ended up in The Townhouse, a pretty soulless 'trendy' hangout near the Corn Exchange. With it being a Sunday afternoon, the place was quite quiet so we sat at the bar. As we chatted, Sug rocked back on his stool and slipped. In an attempt to stop himself from falling over, he grabbed the bar with one hand... and somehow managed to pour his full pint over his head with the other. It's possible that this is the funniest thing that has happened, anywhere, ever. Needless to say, LOLs ensued.
We arrived back at the Cockpit an hour or so later and started chatting to Incense backstage. They were a few years younger than us and seemed nice enough, if a little goonish. The singer, who looked like Barry McGuigan, bragged about the amount of people they'd brought to the other shows they'd done for John, and we had a stupid dick-measuring testosterone-a-thon debate about who had the most 'fans'. I also remember that someone (obviously not us m'lud), started rolling a joint and one of them claimed that their Dad was a policeman, and that he would have to leave as marijuana smoke could, OMG, stay in your hair for months!!! Or something. Incense later changed their name to The Music and had a hit with their début album in 2002. They'd obviously grown up a lot by then, but it was still kind of weird seeing these guys, who we'd met as naive kids (us as well as them), playing Top Of The Pops and Letterman. After they'd left the dressing room we thought it would be fun to put Suggy in the fridge. It was.
Suggini dans le frigo
All this tomfoolery gave us precious little time to check out the other bands. I think I watched a tiny bit of Marsha Wray when I ventured out into the main room to greet the handful of 'fans' who'd come along.
And then it was time for us to play. Back in the day, the Cockpit had several huge problems. For a start the floor was uneven - the floorboards sagged horribly in some areas, and made walking about with a full pint an interesting experience. The acoustics of the room were the main issue though - bass frequencies hung in the air like an obese wasp, and it was perfectly possible to be knocked to the floor by the stomach-high soundwave, every time the kick drum was hit. It was bad enough being in the crowd, but the sound was terrible on stage. I remember that we struggled to hear ourselves and didn't give as good a performance as we were capable of. Again.
Novacain live at the Cockpit. Left to right: Me, Leigh, Win, Mike, Sug. These pictures were obviously taken at the precise moment several hundred audience members nipped out to the loo.
Our set veered all over the place stylistically, with the four new songs being added in place of "Thank You", "Find A Way" and "Running". Attempts at arty alt-rock rubbed shoulders with more poppy numbers like "Slipstream" and the radio-friendly set closer "Second Time Around". Speaking of which, it was only once I'd started "Second Time Around" that I realised my guitar was miles out of tune. It was too late to stop so I ploughed on, hoping the audience wouldn't notice. When we got off stage I spoke to Brian, a mate of Mike and Sug's, who told me that he most definitely had noticed. The moral of the story being: buy a tuning pedal kidz. And don't talk to Brian.
Unlike the poster, our name was actually spelt correctly on the tickets. Which is more than can be said for 'Incence'.
The day kind of petered out for us after we'd played. John was still friendly, but any mention of his previously expressed interest in managing us was deftly ignored, probably thanks to our meagre ticket sales. I remember watching The Sidecar Adventure, if only because they were all wearing blue boiler suits, and thinking that, once again we'd had a fun time without really showing what we could do.
Set list (Novacain)
- Take It Back
- M.F.S.
- Slipstream
- Paracetamol
- Party Politics
- Airflow
- Second Time Around
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