Dave's Gig Guide
Classic rock Society, Rotherham October, 2003
This was a support slot for Swedish Prog-Rock group, ACT. We were in front of a new crowd, determined to grow our audience by expanding sideways into a genre we'd been loosely affiliated with in previous years, progressive rock. On paper, this sounded like a great idea but, what we didn't know at the time was that certain elements of the audience were possibly less tolerant of anything new than your typical hard core EM fan.
Although we seemed to go down well, it was not my favourite gig. To my ears, the material was starting to sound stale, as if we hadn't really moved on in seven or eight years. I'd hopelessly misjudged that band's image too. I'd tried to make us seem lighter and more easy-going rather than the hi-tech image I'd tried to cultivate up to that point because I felt that the technology was beginning to dominate the music. I wanted to go the other way completely - to make the music the star of the show rather than the equipment.
Even though I'd tried to evolve the band's sound over the years, we were still playing arrangements that we'd debuted with in 1997, 6 years earlier. Worse still, we weren't really getting together as a band, either musically or socially, and that didn't help. I think that, by this point, we'd realised that our best was behind us and it was time to move on to pastures new.
I have to conclude that, musically, we just didn't fit in. We weren't electronic enough for the UK EM scene and we weren't progressive enough for the prog-rockers. In a sense, we fell between the two tools and failed to make a serious impact in either.
We mingled with the crowd afterwards, watching ACT, and listening to the feedback. Most of the fans were polite and friendly, even those that didn't like us. But there was one fan who seriously got to me, left me really spooked.
He introduced himself like a long lost friend though I'd never met him before in my life. He said that he liked our stuff and asked if he could have a review copy of the latest album for the magazine he worked for. This is a ploy beloved of certain EM fans out to scrounge a freebie and I normally just tell them to get in touch with me via the web pages and include a link to their fanzine or published works. This always throws off the scroungers.
Undeterred, then this guy started to pester Jules. He has his eyes on her chest and wasn't being too cool about it either. He asked for a couple of pictures of himself with Jules and somebody - Dave, I think - picked up the camera but Jules was quite clearly very unhappy. There was something about him that wasn't right. Then he started telling me about his song writing activities and how he'd been writing music for, amongst others, Eddie Van Halen. Huh? Eddie Van Halen? Yeah, that's what he said. At this point, I realised that we'd strayed into somebody else's fantasy life and so I invented an escape route, grabbed Jules and took her off to sign some autographs. According to the organisers, he's just a harmless loon but that sort of experience really does scare you.
The gig drew a mixture of positive and negative reviews. The organisers had wanted to broaden the range of the acts on the bill, which was why we'd been invited to play. Alas, some of the fans didn't feel the same way. Whilst many were broadly supportive of the new direction, others savaged us for being musically naive and immature. The society's magazine published three fan reviews - two glowing, one incredibly nasty. According to their post box, the mix of reviews had been overwhelming positive and yet they chose to print one that was very caustic to "maintain a balance". Huh? The writer felt that we were musically rubbish, that he'd been writing better quality tunes at the age of 14 and then went on to recommend that a better support act should have been chosen. He even recommended one particular artist, who I will not name. Imagine my surprise when the writer of the letter turned out to be, yeah, you guessed it, the artist's manager.
In the fuss that followed, I fell out with the organisers of the CRS and we've never spoken since, something I regret to this day because I feel that those of us walking this long and lonely path are essentially not in it for the money or the kudos. We're in it because we love this style of music and feel that it would be a shame if it faded to nothing. But just try convincing a bunch of raving prog rock fans of this case and see how far you get.