Jodrell Bank, September 2002

On stage at Jodrell Bank

This was our first headline slot, this time with Ash Prema and Rob Jenkins supporting.

I hired a big white van for this one. It steered like a bloody pig and drank more fuel than any other vehicle I've ever driven but at least there was no shortage of space for all of the gear this time.

We turned up early, got on with the business of unpacking and the mood was excellent with everybody helping out. We sound-checked and the world felt pretty damned good. Ticket sales had been healthy and, coupled with the release of "The Secret Life of Angels", there was a distinct possibility that we might actually make some money this time around. All of our gigs to date had been loss-leaders.

Ash Prema and Rob Jenkins started their set whilst we sat outside, with Jules doping me up on homeopathic anti-stress pills. An hour later and it was our turn.

The auditorium cleared and we settled down to check the equipment. As a precaution, I checked the Akai DR8, which held all of our backing. It was dead. And yet it had been working perfectly an hour before. WTF?

It didn't take long to figure out the cause - somebody had unplugged the keyboard connector from the back of the unit. These connectors are self-latching so it couldn't have happened accidentally. You have to push on a lever and pull to remove the lead. Following the experiences at EMMA, then Alfa Centauri and now Jodrell Bank, I'm absolutely sure that someone in the UK scene is utterly determined to ruin our live performances.

Anyway, I was busy rebooting the DR8 as the audience were being ushered in so, again, the stress levels were high. But I'm an old hand at this now and so it didn't really phase me all that much. The only thing that caused me any real concern was the techno-rave T-shirt I'd bought for the gig, which was seriously too tight around the midriff. As a result, I'd acquired something of an unflattering bulge and if you look at the pictures, you'll see a musician concentrating on playing in time with the rest of the band whilst, at the same time, trying desperately to suck his gut in. Occasionally, he doesn't quite succeed at either task.

But the weirdness didn't stop this becoming another brilliant gig, possibly our finest ever outing. We played a mixture of T-Bass standards and some new SkinMechanix tracks. SkinMechanix had been an experiment from a few years before that hadn't actually gone anywhere positive at the time so I'd re-recorded everything and released it as a solo project, only to discover that the material was actually very popular amongst the retro crowd, a kind of "T-Bass with Sequences."

The band were amazing and really worked hard to pull this off. We were a real team. As a measure of how together we'd become as a band, I'd forgotten to connect my sample player to Jules' keyboard and so she wasn't able to play the voice parts to the track "ZeitGeist". We improvised, with Jules playing her parts at the same time as me on the same keyboard, just transposed a little. There was no flat panic. We didn't fall to pieces. We just got on with it. Even when we cocked up at the start of "The Fabulous Neutrinos", with all three of us coming in at the wrong point, we were able to laugh it off and restart the piece with the audience laughing along. That's what we'd become. A proper band.

The applause was very loud and positive and a lot of people came to talk to us after the gig. A few notable luminaries in the EM scene disappeared into the night with a scowl on their collective faces - I wonder why? - but the reviews that subsequently appeared on the net were universally excellent.

Had we managed to throw off the ghosts of Alfa Centauri? Yes, I think finally we had.

Help! If you have any photographs from this event then please let us know! We had a photographer on site but he didn't bother to take any pictures. He just forgot! Doh!