Ever since we played our first Joseph's Well show in June, we'd been trying to book a follow-up. Our regular promoter, 'Flatnose' John Trueman, didn't use the Well and we weren't really sure how to get a gig ourselves. None of the bands we knew had played there, so we ended up going in one afternoon to hand a demo CD to one of the bar staff.
A week or so later, we found out that Mike's Dad actually knew the guy who was in charge of booking bands. What's more, so did we. Dave worked at a shop called Music Ground in Leeds and we'd chatted to him a few times when we'd been in to admire guitars we couldn't afford. I've no idea why we didn't work this out sooner, or, indeed, why we didn't just ring the 'Bands wanting gigs...' number that appeared on all the Well's posters... Anyways, Mike's Dad told Dave we were looking for a show and he booked us for a headline appearance in December.
As naive young pups, we saw this as a vindication of our musical efforts. Another person in 'the biz' thought us worthy of headlining a show. Wow. We started putting together a 45 minute set, befitting of our place at the top of the bill, and decided we should also do a bit of promotion. Other than cajoling friends and family into attending our gigs, our only real bit of promotional experience was photocopying some flyers provided by Flatnose onto 'crumble effect' paper for our first headline show at the Duchess back in the summer.
We'd decided to come up with a logo a few months earlier and, after batting about symbols based on the centre of a CD jewel case and a 45 rpm record adaptor used in jukeboxes, we decided on... The Hash Sign. I suggested the sign itself, reasoning that it could be typed using a computer keyboard and that it was also *snigger* a reference to 'waccy baccy' (one could LITERALLY feel the walls of society tumbling down). Mike then put an 'N' for Novacain in the centre of the symbol to give us something slightly more unique. It wasn't perhaps the most inventive thing ever, but it did give us some sort of visual identity. And having a logo that was so simple meant that we could create reasonably professional looking flyers and posters without too much time and effort. And reader, that is exactly what we did. The standard thing at the time was to photocopy flyers, four to an A4 sheet of paper, then cut them up with a pair of scissors. We wanted to do something different. Mike suggested using clear acetate and printing six to one A4 sheet to create square flyers. He came up with a basic design and, I have to say, they looked pretty good. There were a couple of problems though... We printed the flyers in blue and red, but the red came out blurred, with some weird yellow fog around the logo. Then there was the cost. They were so expensive to produce that, even at six to one sheet of acetate, we could only make a handful. This meant we had to be really careful who we gave them to, which rather defeats the object of having flyers in the first place.
Having played several times in the preceding weeks, we were better prepared for this show than we'd ever been. Soundcheck went well and the whole night was really fun. It was the last gig of our first year together as Novacain so lots of our friends made the effort to come and see us. And the support band, Lorimer, were absolutely ace. They played old-school punk/new wave music, with crystal clear harmony vocals. Their songs were well written, super catchy and less than three minutes long. I liked them a lot.
We went on around 10pm and played pretty well if I remember correctly. We were really happy with our newer songs, like the Charlatans-esque "Scarborough Warning", and couldn't wait to write more tracks in a similar vein in the new year. For now we had to pad out the show with older songs, but we felt we were finally heading in the right direction musically. One old song that we were pleased with was "End Of The World", which we reintroduced to our set after an absence of several months. We thought the original version was a bit too slow (Winny compared it to "Suicide Is Painless", the theme from M*A*S*H), so we rearranged it to start acoustically, then TRANSFORM into a rock behemoth after the second verse. Looking back, the original was clearly better, but we were obsessed with "getting the crowd moving" at the time, and thought we could only do this by rocking out. The audience (i.e. our friends and relatives) seemed to like it anyway and we ended up doing our first ever encore, coming back on stage to play "Slipstream" for the second time that night.
A week or so later, we found out that Mike's Dad actually knew the guy who was in charge of booking bands. What's more, so did we. Dave worked at a shop called Music Ground in Leeds and we'd chatted to him a few times when we'd been in to admire guitars we couldn't afford. I've no idea why we didn't work this out sooner, or, indeed, why we didn't just ring the 'Bands wanting gigs...' number that appeared on all the Well's posters... Anyways, Mike's Dad told Dave we were looking for a show and he booked us for a headline appearance in December.
As naive young pups, we saw this as a vindication of our musical efforts. Another person in 'the biz' thought us worthy of headlining a show. Wow. We started putting together a 45 minute set, befitting of our place at the top of the bill, and decided we should also do a bit of promotion. Other than cajoling friends and family into attending our gigs, our only real bit of promotional experience was photocopying some flyers provided by Flatnose onto 'crumble effect' paper for our first headline show at the Duchess back in the summer.
One of Mikey C's early attempts at logo design.
We'd decided to come up with a logo a few months earlier and, after batting about symbols based on the centre of a CD jewel case and a 45 rpm record adaptor used in jukeboxes, we decided on... The Hash Sign. I suggested the sign itself, reasoning that it could be typed using a computer keyboard and that it was also *snigger* a reference to 'waccy baccy' (one could LITERALLY feel the walls of society tumbling down). Mike then put an 'N' for Novacain in the centre of the symbol to give us something slightly more unique. It wasn't perhaps the most inventive thing ever, but it did give us some sort of visual identity. And having a logo that was so simple meant that we could create reasonably professional looking flyers and posters without too much time and effort. And reader, that is exactly what we did. The standard thing at the time was to photocopy flyers, four to an A4 sheet of paper, then cut them up with a pair of scissors. We wanted to do something different. Mike suggested using clear acetate and printing six to one A4 sheet to create square flyers. He came up with a basic design and, I have to say, they looked pretty good. There were a couple of problems though... We printed the flyers in blue and red, but the red came out blurred, with some weird yellow fog around the logo. Then there was the cost. They were so expensive to produce that, even at six to one sheet of acetate, we could only make a handful. This meant we had to be really careful who we gave them to, which rather defeats the object of having flyers in the first place.
Having played several times in the preceding weeks, we were better prepared for this show than we'd ever been. Soundcheck went well and the whole night was really fun. It was the last gig of our first year together as Novacain so lots of our friends made the effort to come and see us. And the support band, Lorimer, were absolutely ace. They played old-school punk/new wave music, with crystal clear harmony vocals. Their songs were well written, super catchy and less than three minutes long. I liked them a lot.
Joseph's Well hadn't hit its stride in 1999, so the gig calender looks a bit bare, even for December. Runston Parva (later to become Parva, then The Kaiser Chiefs), Mr Shiraz and Visa would all end up being Well stalwarts, along with little old us.
We went on around 10pm and played pretty well if I remember correctly. We were really happy with our newer songs, like the Charlatans-esque "Scarborough Warning", and couldn't wait to write more tracks in a similar vein in the new year. For now we had to pad out the show with older songs, but we felt we were finally heading in the right direction musically. One old song that we were pleased with was "End Of The World", which we reintroduced to our set after an absence of several months. We thought the original version was a bit too slow (Winny compared it to "Suicide Is Painless", the theme from M*A*S*H), so we rearranged it to start acoustically, then TRANSFORM into a rock behemoth after the second verse. Looking back, the original was clearly better, but we were obsessed with "getting the crowd moving" at the time, and thought we could only do this by rocking out. The audience (i.e. our friends and relatives) seemed to like it anyway and we ended up doing our first ever encore, coming back on stage to play "Slipstream" for the second time that night.
From left to right: Me, Winny (behind Leigh), Leigh, Mike, Suggy.
Set list (Novacain)
- Stick To What You Know
- Back Row Exit
- Slipstream
- M.F.S.
- Paracetamol
- New Song #1
- Party Politics
- End Of The World
- She Keeps Me
- Scarborough Warning
- Second Time Around Encore
- Slipstream
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