*Which closed several years later after a police raid discovered they were selling stolen instruments.
Meals & Joseph's Wells
When Walkabout closed we retrieved the bottles of wine that Chris's teacher had bought from the Well and hidden in a bush at the front of LGI, then headed back to my friends house on Clarendon Road to continue the party. Guitar shop bloke tried to chat up my mate Jo while she and her flatmates cleaned their house and I tried, successfully I might add, to get very drunk indeed.
Cleaning 4 Claremont Villas. I don't think I was a lot of help.
It wasn't the 'last night' I'd have planned, but at least it was memorable I guess. Of course this all meant that we had IN NO WAY cleaned our house, so Chris and I had to get up a few hours after returning home to start The Final Tidy. We thought it would take a few hours. It actually took all day. Awesome. By 10 o'clock that night we still hadn't finished, but I decided to go see the girls one last time anyway while Chris went out with his friend Milk Bar Pam*.
*A girl from Chris's course who we used to regularly bump into at 'Smile' indie nights at the Harvey Milk Bar, the premiere club venue in Leeds uni which was knocked down the year after we left and rebuilt as Stylus. She was called Pam. Natch.
My room at Wood Lane, shortly before The Move.
The following day I took the posters down in my room, packed my world up into ticky tacky little cardboard boxes and said a final goodbye to 23 Wood Lane. SOB.
Moving out took much longer than I expected, which meant that I didn't arrive back at my parents until tea time. We were meant to be soundchecking for our appearance in the Yorkshire Battle of the Bands 2001 final an hour later and Mum was actually in tears because she thought I might not be able to get there in time, which was incredibly sweet.
In the event, I made it. Not that it mattered - the sound on stage was terrible and, despite Mike remonstrating with the engineer, we still couldn't hear our vocals by the time we were kicked off stage to make way for another of the bands.
Mentioned in the Yorkshire Post. Novacain had finally hit the big time.
Competition rules stated that bands had to play two songs in the final that they hadn't played in the heats, and no covers were allowed. This caused us all sorts of problems. We hadn't written anything in the past month, which meant either substituting some of our better songs for older material that we weren't happy with, or hastily writing some new tunes. Given that we weren't exactly prolific, it seemed unlikely that we'd be able to pen two songs in a week, but we gave it a go anyway. Surprisingly we managed to cobble together a track called "All I Know", which sounded like a shonky version of "1979" by Smashing Pumpkins. I didn't have any solid lead lines, and I seem to remember that Leigh didn't have complete lyrics, but it was ok so into the set it went, in place of the (far superior) "One For The People". That still left us with another place to fill. The rest of the band wanted to play my track "Meaning Of Life", but Leigh vetoed the idea because his girlfriend had told him that the lyrics were "a bit weird". Sigh. In the end we replaced "Quick Release" with "Sibling", a decision no-one was particularly happy with.
Rules and regs y'all.
Because we'd spent most of our rehearsals that week trying to write "All I Know", we hadn't had much time to practice our set which, coupled with the poor soundcheck, meant that we were rather nervous while we waited our turn to play. We'd been drawn third, which would normally have been good but, under the circumstances, I think we'd have preferred to go on first and get it over with. We were so nervous in fact that we spent most of the night hanging out in the car park.
Tickets for the final consisted of tickets for the heats, cut in half with 'Final' written on in permanent marker. Classy times.
Daydream, who we'd played with at Woodkirk Valley the previous Autumn, were on first. Although I only saw ten minutes of their set, I thought they were decent enough without having massively improved in the last year. Still, they were pretty good and it was obvious that winning the final would be no easy task for us.
I remember next to nothing about Huddersfield's Gweedo. I think they might have been a sort of grungey-punk band. All I've got to go on is a note in my diary that says they "sucked ass". Hmm...
Finally it was time for us to play. We came on stage to an intro tape crafted by Mike, which segued straight into our opening number, "Gibbsy's Street". The sound was terrible, but we battled on and, after sneaking between us to turn the guitar amps up several times during the first three songs, the engineer eventually sorted things out for the second half. We made a few mistakes and "All I Know" sounded a bit too much like the quickly thrown together song that it was, but general feeling was that the set had gone well.
I found these poor quality photos on the now-defunct Greer Lawrence foundation website a few years after we played.
The car park once again beckoned after we'd packed our gear away. We stood around awkwardly, conducting a detailed post-mortem of our performance. If anyone asked, we weren't bothered about winning though. Obviously. We'd had fun. And that was ALL THAT MATTERED. The confident sounds of Edison Medicine wafted through the cracks in the fire exits all the while.
Eventually the night came to a close and one of the organisers took to the stage to thank everyone for coming and to announce the results. Earlier in the evening, during a photo shoot for a local paper outside the venue, the same guy had enthusiastically shouted to us that "the main man" from V2 records was going to be at the final. I'm not sure who he meant exactly, but Richard Branson was certainly nowhere to be seen. And there wasn't much evidence of the company's "regional scout" Jenny Gibson either, despite the fact that we'd been told she would be at all the heats. Nevertheless our hearts were in our greedy mouths when he opened the first of two golden envelopes to announce that the runner up of that year's Yorkshire Battle of the Bands was... Gweedo. Bollocks. I knew then that we hadn't won. Edison Medicine had put on such a good show at our semi-final that I knew they'd be the band to beat. If they hadn't finished second then surely they'd finished first?
Were this blog a movie, Novacain would have triumphed against ALL of the odds. We'd have won the final, been carried out of the building on the shoulders of The People and secured a lifelong recording contract that made us into billionaires. But real life is far more dull. Reader: we lost. Edison Medicine won and we came precisely nowhere. In the years that followed, I liked to tell people that we came third, which sounds kind of romantic. But I'm not sure that's not actually true. I think we were actually unclassified runners up. Which is just kind of lame. Hmmph.
Of course we took all this in good grace and IN NO WAY stomped around the Greenside Arms telling everyone who would listen, and some people who would not, that it was all A FIX and AN OUTRAGE and that we should have AT LEAST FINISHED SECOND.
We may have lost, but it wasn't all bad -> we got this AMAZING TROPHY. Wow.
An Aside:
We bumped into a guy from Edison Medicine a few years later. Apparently the studio time that formed the bulk of their prize for winning the Battle of the Bands was next to useless. The engineer at the studio wasn't interested in them, rushed the session and the band ended up ditching the recordings they made together.
Set list (Novacain)
- Intro
- Gibbsy's Street
- Cull
- Heads You Lose
- Now You've Got It, Use It
- Sibling
- New Song #11 (All I Know)
- Echo
- End Of The World
No comments:
Post a Comment