As 1981 progressed we finished renovating and soundproofing our rehearsal room ‘The Dairy’.
We also called it ‘The void’ as the peaceful old room with its boxes of wrinkled apples and
sleeping cats was now a totally characterless whitewashed box... an obvious outcome we
hadn’t considered until it was too late.
We also discovered when we closed the reinforced door for the first time and heard the dog
barking outside in the yard as clear as day, that soundproofing is no easy matter. But our few
neighbours were far away and this was our room, we were lucky to have it.
It was still quite a challenge for us to play our songs without making mistakes so we played
them over and over again and tried to write new pieces. At first we had no way of recording
ourselves so we had to just remember what we’d done. Almost all of my lyric ideas from this
period were terrible and make painful reading when I look back at them but thankfully few of
them got further than my note books.
I was reading now though and I could feel how it was changing me. I’d moved on from ’Time
must have a stop’ to ‘Brave new world’ and was cautiously starting to talk about these new
discoveries with more experienced readers and noting down their recommendations... D H
Lawrence, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Kafka, Dostoyevski, Kerouac...
Two of these more experienced readers were friends of Justin’s who had formed a band, one
playing bass, the other keyboard and vocals - they called themselves ‘Tonton Macoute’. They
never made a record and weren’t active for long but we liked what they were doing a lot and
even covered one of their songs some years later (‘The Renegade’ inspired by a short story by
Albert Camus).
The second time we played at the Green Dragon in Stratford-upon-Avon we invited ‘Tonton
Macoute’ to open for us. It was quite a memorable evening because after they’d played a few
songs the landlord of this pub who was a big, grumpy old git came up to me and shouted “What
the fuck is this all about? - I’ve been putting bands on here for 20 years and this is absolutely
the worst, unlistenable, shit I’ve ever heard - get the bastards off that stage now!”. This
confirmed to me that they were as good, probably even better than I thought they were and
thankfully I managed to persuade him to let them finish their set.
We were using our own home made PA that night and it sounded OK because it was a small
room, but halfway through our set the PA amp exploded, filling the place with toxic smoke and
emptying the whole pub onto the pavement.
Through new friends in Evesham we were able open for ‘Blurt’ one night at a pub in Stroud,
Gloucestershire. I was very impressed by Ted Milton’s performance and from then on went to
see ‘Blurt’ whenever possible.
With a few new songs written we decided to record our second demo at the same home studio
in Malvern, with the same sound engineer. This time he demonstrated his superiority as a
musician by line checking our drums himself with an embarrassingly impressive drum solo,
followed by a bit of slap bass and then rounded off by producing a huge expensive looking piece
of equipment called a ‘Guitar synth’ which he plugged Justin’s Hofner into and after much
fiddling around gave us a guitar solo that sounded like a talking duck.
We politely declined the offer of using the ‘guitar synth’ and the demo came out sounding pretty
good... so we mailed cassettes out to various places, including ‘Fiction records’. I don’t know if
that had anything to do with it but towards the end of the year the best thing that could have
happened to us happened and we were invited to support The Cure on an eight date tour of the
UK.