Memories of a Wannabe Pop Star

When we are young it is often music that shapes our hopes, dreams and ambitions and this was no different for me. This is my story…

Our band used to play fairly regularly in a small backstreet pub called The Swan in my hometown in the UK. The pub is now closed and boarded up, but back in 1987/88 it was an easy place for local bands to book a gig.

We were no exception; we would just go in a couple of weeks before and pay the £15 to the landlord for the hire of the hall and he would never ask any questions or want to hear a demo tape, which was fine with us. I should point out that our demo recordings weren’t too bad...

...it was when we played live that was the problem!

The front bar of The Swan was always fairly quiet with a couple of locals, including a couple of 50-something Teddy Boys who seemed to be still living in the 1950s. I think the pub was once in its heyday the place to go locally if you wanted to watch genuine rock‘n’roll bands, such as Bobby Angelo & The Tuxedos and Tony & The Impalas, but by the mid-80’s things had changed. Instead, these diehard Teddy Boys would enjoy their beers over a chat with the other locals while seemingly oblivious to the noise which would often blare out from the room at the back.

We would bring our equipment in the car and park it up the side of the pub, which was situated right next to the Hogsmill River. The river in those days teamed with swarms of mosquitos while omitting this strange unpleasant odour. I think the cause of this smell was a chemical added to the water by the sewage works not far up stream.

We would lug our equipment in through the large side door into the small hall and set it up. At one end of the hall was a really small stage and facing it at the other was a small bar. To one side, pushed against the wall was a covered pool table and we would set up a small table by the entrance door which led in from the pub where a friend would sit and collect the entrance fee. The hall never came with a PA, so we would always hire one from our local music shop ABC Music for £25.

Our band was called The Electric Guineafowl and we played a mixture of punk and indie music, although it wasn’t too serious and many of our songs had a humorous edge to them. We were in many ways quite heavily influenced by the punk band Splodgenessabounds, who were famous for unleashing upon the world such memorable classics as Two Pints of Larger.

Some of our music consisted of covers by other bands, such as Teenage Kicks by The Undertones, Let’s Lynch the Landlord by the Dead Kennedys and the surf instrumental Wipe Out by The Surfaris, but the rest of our set was own material. These songs consisted of Joe the Cleaner, Pink Armadillo, Victoria Bops, Bump Start the Day and the poetical Burning Babies.

Here’s a video of our 4-track demo from 1986 of Joe the Cleaner.

We would always perform our gigs with another band, which in most cases was our friend’s band. His name was Mark and the band was called The Villains of Peace. They later changed their name to Desolation Boulevard before Mark went off to try unsuccessfully to forge a career as the next Billy Idol. We also occasionally played with a Goth band called The Embrace. Their lead guitarist/vocalist went by the name of Echo, although I’m sure his real name was probably something like John or Derek.

Our gigs were usually timed to coincide with an important occasion, such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day (!), Halloween, or Christmas, and these gigs would always be preceded with a vigorous early morning fly-posting campaign. This would involve driving around the area at 5.30am in the car with a paint brush and a big bucket of glue and jumping out commando style and pasting up our small A4 sized home-made posters, which we had Xeroxed covertly on the copier at the local university.

The local record shop Beggars Banquet was always supportive to local bands and they would kindly allow us to put one of our posters in their front window. Incidentally, it was also Beggars Banquet who helped us to find our drummer by allowing us to put an ad up, too. This ad had been written in the pub on the peeled off back of a badly stained beer mat the evening before and was delivered to the shop by a Goth girl we knew who worked around the corner in the local Tax office.

Even though we’d put up many of these posters, I don’t think a single one of them ever attracted a person to one of our gigs. Instead, most of our audience consisted of friends and fellow workmates.

My friend Mark, as well as being a singer, was always a great MC and in between the performances he would organise competitions for everyone in the hall to participate in. These would include a raffle or in some cases even a game of Pass-the-Parcel (!). The prizes were nothing special and usually consisted of something like a bottle of cooking oil. It wasn’t very hardcore ‘punk’, but the audience did enjoy it.

The Electric Guineafowl would always perform wearing fancy dress. Quite often this would be related to whichever event we were celebrating. I think we even once contemplated the idea of playing naked, but luckily that never went further than being drunken beer talk.

None of us were very confident musicians and we would always suffer from serious nerves before each gig. I was so nervous one time that after writing ‘Love’ in lipstick on my forehead in the car rear-view mirror, it wasn’t until we were performing on stage that someone pointed out that it had been written on backwards.

Because we were so nervous, we would literally play our songs at breakneck speed. Our carefully choreographed set would collapse into complete confusion as we had our mass on-stage panic attack. Dave, the lead guitarist, would completely forget how to play the songs or he would simply start playing the wrong one. Many times we would have to stop half-way through a song because someone had completely messed up. Our vocalist, who was also called Dave, would then apologise to the audience and more often than not give the musician responsible a cursory dressing down. Then we would give the song a second attempt – and in some cases even a third attempt.

My left hand would often seize up from pressing down too hard on the strings of my bass guitar due to a combination of nerves and adrenaline and this would impede my ability to play the riffs properly. In fact, this resulted in me hardly being able to play at all. Instead, I’d just end up creating an amplified thudding sound. On top of that, my amp was often plagued with technical issues and so instead of playing the song, I would be around the back of it with a screwdriver trying to get it to work …meanwhile, the band played on.

Our hearts would sink as we would watch the members of our small audience get up and walk out as we bravely continued to play...

By the end of the set, the only people left in that small but now empty hall would be girlfriends; the other band, and our friend who had kindly mixed the sound for us.

Our gigs always left us feeling quite disillusioned by the whole experience. We always ended up losing money. Not once did we ever break-even, although we did once raise £50 for the charity Help a London Child, which was surprising for us.

We really believed we were going to one day make it big in the music business. We were young and full of enthusiasm and this would give us the drive to carry on. We would only talk about new ideas for our music and performances and nothing could beat that optimism we shared for the future. It was exciting and we had a purpose, hope and friendship.

We really believed that by playing at The Swan would be our first step towards success, but sadly our dreams never led us beyond that small hall-for-hire and eventually drifted away with the stinky waters of the Hogsmill River.

Until next time…