Coasta + 22 Blue + Nebula UK + Plasticine + Playground / The Cockpit, Leeds

My last gig of the 20th Century was a 'Flatnose' John Trueman event at the Cockpit. On the bill were Plasticine and 22 Blue, who Novacain had played shows with over the past year, plus Playground, a new band formed by one of my school friends. As well as genuinely liking Plasticine's music, my band felt a bit of a duty to support them as their singer Ste, who worked at Cherrytree Studios where Novacain practiced, had helped get us our first show. We also thought we needed to schmooze a bit with John now that Leigh had tired of taking his phonecalls.

I'd been suffering from THE FLU O'DOOM in the run up to the gig and would have happily spent another night in bed but we'd bought tickets in advance from Ste and I wasn't prepared to see my money go to waste. Mike and Suggy picked me up in Mike's red Fiesta Mk II, which was The Official Novacain Band Vehicle circa 1999-2000, and we drove to the Cockpit where we met my school mate Spenner.

Mike's Fiesta circa 2000. Novacain posse in FULL EFFECT boi.

Playground were first up and played an enjoyable, if slightly odd, set. They'd been formed by Chris, a guy from my year at school, and his younger brother Andy in summer '99. Chris was the lead vocalist, which I found pretty weird as he hadn't been remotely interested in music when we were at Morley High. I can only assume that Andy, who was a guitarist, persuaded his brother to start a band with him. I first saw them at the Cross Keys pub in Morley with Spenner a few months earlier and thought they were decent enough. Chris was actually a good singer and the band had their own basic, but often catchy, take on American punk. Some aspects of their shows, and some of their tunes, left a lot to be desired though...

Playground persuaded Blakes, another school friend of mine, to dress up in a penguin costume and run about during their performances. This was quite funny. The first time. Second time; not so much. Their drummer wore a nappy and their on-stage banter was more than a little cringe worthy.  And then there was "Zanzibar", the band's 'signature song'. It sounded a bit like a bad ska-punk cover of "Combine Harvester" by The Wurzels. The bulk of the lyrics consisted of four lines, repeated over and over again:

Ooh ar, ooh ar, we're off to Zanzibar.

Shall we take the car?

Maybe it's a Ford Fiesta

Unsurprisingly this put a lot of people off, including Mike and Sug. I thought they had something though. Behind the duff gags and 'zany' antics, were some decent tunes. And lots of people agreed. Novacain often talked about trying to gain 'a following', but Playground actually succeeded. Through a combination of incessant gigging, catchy songs and silly live shows, which were probably more appealing to a younger crowd, Playground managed to gather a large number of teenage fans. They were particularly popular amongst Morley's disenfranchised 'moshers'; following a band being slightly more interesting than hanging out in bus shelters.

After the show Chris asked if Novacain would support his band at the Duchess in January. Although we didn't like playing the venue we'd found out that it was going to shut for good in a few months time so we thought it would be nice to do one last gig there for old times sake, and at least doing a show for Playground meant we didn't have to deal with Flatnose.

Plasticine played a solid set of kooky rock songs afterwards. We enjoyed it but the school kids who'd turned up to see Playground were less keen...

Following Plasticine's set we turned our attentions to the bar and I don't remember much about the rest of the show as a consequence, in fact the only thing I can remember about the next band, Nebula UK, is that we had a discussion about how terribly generic their name was.

An aside:

As long as there have been bands there have been bad band names. 'The Beatles' is famously cited as a terrible name and I'd probably agree, although my Dad assures me that the cheesy 'beat' pun seemed less naff in the more innocent early 1960s. 'Local bands' really take, not just the cake but the entire bally dessert menu in my experience though. I can almost forgive ridiculous monikers like ''Jeremy Beadle's Hand' and 'Biscuithead and the Biscuit Badgers' (real Leeds bands by the way), at least they're fun and unique. The worst offenders are the bland, and completely uninspiring names, of which there are two main types:

"Lets pick a random word from the dictionary"

Er, like Novacain for instance. Doh. The ABSOLUTE WORST offender has to be any of the numerous bands called Shine though. Unbearably lame.

"Lets pick a random word from the dictionary, then add a random number before/after it"

Thankfully this doesn't seem to happen as much in these ENLIGHTENED TIMEZ, but the practice was rife amongst unsigned bands in the late '90s. Cloud 99, Base 4, Day No.8, Project 254 and Circa 72 were just some of the groups you could see at places like the Duchess and Joseph's Well in 1999 should you have wished.

And talking of rubbish names, 22 Blue were on next. They were possibly the only group who played more gigs for Flatnose than we did, in fact they'd played with us at half of the six shows we'd done for John, so we'd seen plenty of them over the past year. As usual they weren't bad, but they didn't really have much of an edge to their music.

Although I was pretty hammered by the time Coasta came on, I remember them being half decent. Their singer was wearing standard issue Mod/Madchester garb and Coasta weren't a million miles away from either of those two scenes musically. Acoustic guitar was to the fore but otherwise they sounded a bit like Novacain. Or at least they sounded like we wanted to sound. The funny thing was I wasn't that taken with Coasta... Maybe it was time for a musical rethink as far as my own band were concerned.