After the fight in The Asylum club we needed a new bass guitarist. A friend of ours from the village called Steven Burrows was the obvious candidate so we asked him and he agreed to join us; he was the same age as Justin and Nick (19) and like ourselves he was a punk inspired self-taught musician. Another key factor was that he knew all our songs well as he’d been at almost all of our gigs either in the audience or supporting us with his own group ‘Guilt For Dreaming’ - who were anyway breaking up. He was and is a great music lover whose taste was very much in line with our own and it was soon clear that he was better suited to the role than Graham was.
Within two months he was playing his first gigs with us in Scotland. These gigs were set up by two girls we’d met after playing at the Glasgow Pavilions with The Cure. If we don’t include a group of friends who followed us around and gave us great support in those days, Karen and Senga were like our first ‘fans’… although I think we were as impressed with them as they were with us, as not only were they charming, seemingly fearless girls, they came from an area of the city called Easterhouse which in many ways is about as far away from rural Worcestershire as you can get in the British Isles and they spoke with such amazing accents that at first it was almost impossible to understand what they were talking about.
Anyway, in their quest to get us back up to play in Glasgow they walked into the office of the best known venue in town and told the boss that they knew some boys from England who were in a brilliant band called ‘And Also The Trees’ and he should book us.
He must have liked their direct style as he agreed and a kind of camaraderie between them was formed which resulted in bookings for us in other clubs in Scotland where he had ‘influence’. The girls also discovered that if there were any disputes about how much we should get paid at the end of the night, just mentioning his name had the effect of pressing a mute button and seeing fast forward images of people handing over bank notes.
But persuading enough people to come and see a band they’d never heard of was beyond even his powers. It was obvious that to progress we had to sign to a record label and get a record out. Our cassette release ‘From Under The Hill’ on the ‘pre-release’ label ‘BPM Records’ was actually selling quite well but any hope of attracting the interest of anyone in the music business came to a sudden halt when ‘BPM’ were investigated and exposed as fraudulent in a weekly section of ‘Sounds’ music paper called PANIC BUTTON.
Simply put, the man in the garden shed in suburban London wasn’t presenting his ‘contacts at record companies and promotional agencies’ with the sales figures of cassettes that bands had paid him to manufacture, because according to PANIC BUTTON he didn’t actually have any contacts.
On top of this revelation some of the groups who had agreed to let him photograph them as an additional part of the service were accusing him of making improper suggestions… presumably removing articles of clothing or posing in a provocative way, which to be fair has proved to be a highly effective tactic for certain artists - but he obviously went about it in the wrong way with the wrong bands, so sordid behaviour was added to the general slur that brought an end to his activities.
By this point we’d wised up a bit and weren’t particularly surprised by this exposé - our view was that he was an OK guy, but a bit of a bullshitter trying to operate in a business where he should have fitted in quite comfortably.
So, thinking that giving demo tapes to record companies in person might have better results than the ones we’d mailed out, Nick and I spent a few days walking around London delivering them by hand.
We went to the major companies, like EMI and Polydor, with foyers like expensive hotels and gave packages we’d made from photographic prints containing copies of ‘From Under The Hill’ to smartly turned out receptionists who we suspected would drop what we’d just given them in the bin under the desk before we were back out on the street - and we went to the indie labels including one on a street of terraced houses where we gave a copy to a white girl with dreadlocks in a baggy jumper who looked like she’d slept in the garden. She smiled, was very enthusiastic and thanked us. We liked her and I hoped the label she worked for would get back in touch and sign us up.