Author of "The Birth And Impact Of Britpop: Mis-Shapes, Scenesters And Insatiable Ones"
When I was 21 I started a band.
Didn’t we all.
We had a name.
A really terrible name.
The Persuaders.
We took our name from the 1970’s action comedy series of the same name. It felt very…Britpop.
The show starred Roger Moore and Tony Curtis.
The show title was actually The Persuaders!
But even I wasn’t a big enough prick to put an exclamation mark in my band name. We didn’t play a gig.
We didn’t write any songs.
We just sort of existed for about six months.
When people asked any of us what we did we would say that we were in a band. We went everywhere together. We had this thing that we would never sit down…in the pub, in the club, at parties, always standing, and always standing together.
Pretentious?
Moi?
It gets worse.
We all carried little tins of Café Créme cigars with us…but none of us smoked. We would just take them out at social events and hold them in a very arch, slightly camp, and utterly affected, manner. Occasionally we would raise them to our lips as if we might be about to light them, but we never did.
One day I tried to write some lyrics for a song.
The fact that nobody else in the band could actually play their instrument to any level of competence didn’t concern me.
The opening lines to that song were; “Saturday night at Caesar’s Palace, a crowded dance floor, filled with malice.”
I’m not joking.
Caesar’s was the local nightclub in Kirkcaldy, the miserable, risible, coastal town where I lived when I wasn’t away at University. It was a pit. The sort of awful NITE KLUB where awful people gathered to dance to even more awful music. Quite how we avoided having the shit kicked out of us more often than we did is a mystery.
No musical talent.
No songs.
A terrible name.
One dreadful attempt at lyric writing that makes the sort of poetry that Adrian Mole wrote to Pandora Braithwaite look like Keats.
And yet, despite all of that, it is infinitely better than “Algorithms” by Kasabian. Go figure.
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