After that first gig all we wanted was to play live again. We thought that maybe if we made a vocal PA we could be self sufficient, hire out places and put gigs on ourselves or play in the back rooms of pubs. So, again, we searched around for bits of wood and followed Dr J’s cabinet designs which he then fitted out with a bewildering array of speakers he managed to conjure up. What we ended up with was something that looked like two 8ft tall totem poles made up of cubes, columns and perched on top two horns that resembled giant, angular megaphones.
We also needed to create a rehearsal room, so - across the yard at the back of our house there was an outhouse that was once used as a dairy. In the dairy there was a small upstairs room. The floorboards were rotten and the ceiling was caving in, there was a bed with a burst mattress where cats slept and had litters of kittens. In the winter we stored crates of apples there which gave the room a good smell. There were two windows, one of which let in the morning sun. It was a nice, tranquil place… but still, we mercilessly set about gutting it and turning it into a soundproof box.
It was a major work though, so in the meantime we remained in Justin’s bedroom (directly above our parents bedroom). There was one afternoon there that was particularly significant for me; the others were playing a very slow, brooding piece, slower than anything they’d played before with Justin holding his guitar against his multi-speaker cab and creating controlled feedback that sounded like seagulls… unexpected and magical. I really wanted to add a vocal but had no lyrics and no ideas, so in a moment of desperation I went to a cupboard at the top of the stairs that was full of boxes of old books, took out a worn, pale blue, hardback and started reading random passages.
The book was ’Time must have a stop’ by Aldous Huxley. I’d never heard of him and it could have been anything, but the words that I started narrating seemed to compliment that solemn piece of music perfectly and later, in an equally haphazard way, the book influenced other songs - including one called ’So this is silence’ which was to become, some years later, the opening track of our first album.
I had left school with next to no qualifications and a belief that books were for other people… but reading ’Time must have a stop’, as I then felt duty bound to, opened the door to the world of literature and I have continued reading, taking inspiration and an immeasurable amount of pleasure from books ever since.
Our search for gigs in local pubs was in vain but we were offered a place supporting a local rock band at a ‘Young Farmers Pig roast and Disco’ at a farm just outside the village in a covered riding arena. It sounded straight forward enough but it didn’t turn out how we, or anyone else expected.