Insense + 22 Blue + Novacain + Cloud 99 / The Cockpit, Leeds

By September 1999 John 'Flatnose' Trueman had started regularly putting on shows at The Cockpit in Leeds and Sound in London alongside his 'It's Gone Ballistic!" nights at The Duchess. At the time, The Pepsi Network Chart Show, a short-lived Top Of The Pops rip-off broadcast by Channel 5, was being filmed at Sound, a fact that John may have mentioned once or twice. He was forever trying to get us to play the venue. Apparently "A&R men" would be there in force. Of course we'd have to sell (bloody expensive) tickets to our 'fans' first. We'd then all travel down together in a coach rented by Flatnose and live HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Or something. I think we felt tied to John to a certain extent (although we'd played a couple of non-Flatnose gigs, we weren't really sure how to go about getting more shows ourselves) but we were finally starting to realise that he might not be the only game in town. We'd made the decision to avoid The Duchess for a bit following our headline show there in August, when all manner of things had gone wrong, and we also decided to ignore John's offers of a London show. Which left us with The Cockpit. For the next four months we played the majority of our shows there; partly because we liked the sound on stage and the sense that we were performing in a high-profile venue and partly because we were still trying to work out how to get gigs elsewhere.

We enjoyed playing The Cockpit, but we were also unsure where to go next. We felt that the previous pop concerts we'd done for John were leading somewhere (after our first show we'd been offered a place higher up the bill, after our second show we'd been asked to play an all-dayer at a bigger venue and after that show we'd headlined for the first time), but this gig represented more of the same. Cloud 99 were the only band on the bill that we hadn't played with at least once before and, although we still wanted to play well and have fun, hawking tickets round our friends and family was becoming a bit of a bind.

We played a shortened version of our set from Gildersome Green the previous month, dropping "End Of The World" because we thought it was too 'mid-tempo'. Despite the fact that it was probably our best track. Awesome. We'd been struggling to write, or at least finish, songs since Gildersome, so this was the first time we played a gig without at least one new tune in the set. Things went well as far as I remember, but I know we all felt a little deflated when we came off stage. I'd been hoarding memorabilia since Hall Aid, but Mike had to remind me to nick a poster as we were leaving and, even then, I chose a lame photocopied effort rather than one of the nicer, colour posters I usually bagged.

I remember making a real effort to watch the support bands, but I also remember next to nothing about them... apart from Insense. I thought they were ok last time we played with them, but I was really impressed at this gig, particularly with the guitarist Adam Nutter, who would later be compared to John Squire when the band changed their name to The Music and made it. Man. On one song he used his wah pedal with a delay to create a kind of swirling effect. "I'm having that away" I thought, and I ended up incorporating it into "Scarborough Warning", the first song we wrote after this show.

Set list (Novacain)

1. Stick To What You Know
2. M.F.S.
3. New Song #1
4. Party Politics
5. Back Row Exit
6. Slipstream
7. Second Time Around