Digest...

Full running times (subject to acts of PopArt):

330 Jonny Cola & The A-Grades

430 Machetes

530 Cursors

630 New Royal Family

730 Last Army

830 Gamages Model Train Club

930 Jailhouse Judd & His Jailbait Juniors

… just in case you missed this on the main site…

 We’ve made the following singles available as a free download from today:.

• Brontosaurus Chorus - Love Is The Path To Self-Destruction
• And What Will Be Left Of Them? - L’amour Violent

 Download ‘em now!

Here is the video for Brontosaurus Chorus’ Love Is The Path…

“Alright mate, Water Rats is cancelled due to a leak in the roof. Gig’s off.” When the plug is pulled it’s dissapointing for the band, as well as the audience. Some comfort can be taken from irony (a canal-inspired venue flooding) but not much. I found myself with an unexpected evening off which I spent in Barnes.

Be it cheery locals, or entering the ‘live’ room through the gents, each venue adds its own distinct flavour to a night out. Bruce Dickinson knew this when he told the crowd at Long Beach arena that Iron Maiden were in it for the music, not to “shag some bimbo in the car park.”

Riding that sentiment, here are my top five greatest music venues:

1. Madison Square Garden, New York. Led Zeppelin recorded their live album ‘The Song Remains the Same’ here over three nights. The venue was also eaten by Godzilla’s kids (1998) but the Zep link is cooler.

2. Rock in Rio festival. Not strictly a venue, Queen played to 250,000 people in 1985. This clip is great as the presenter greets you with “welcome to the pink palace once again.” Oo-er.

3. Plaza Del Toros, Madrid. The setting for AC/DC’s 1996 video ‘No Bull’. Memorable for the golf cart used by Angus Young to ride from one side of the stage, into the crowd, and back.

4. The Junction, Cambridge. A breeze-block venue in one of East Anglia’s crapper towns, the Junction will always have a place in my heart as I saw Elastica (a good band not yet famous) support Kingmaker (a shit band) there.   

5. Rock in Rio. Yes, no one was more surprised than I to find out that the Maiden have been there as well!

Myself and The Validators recently played a gig at De Montfort University Students’ Union, and were AGHAST at what we saw. Everyone seemed CLEAN, WELL FED and - shockingly - NOT DRUNK. The car park was full of CARS, belonging to STUDENTS, there was an ESTATE AGENT’S within the building itself for students who would rather buy a house than live in the luxuriously appointed (with EN SUITE BATHROOMS) halls of residence and the young people were discussing what JOBS they would accept when they left.

OH HOW DIFFERENT it all was when I was a student there, back in the dog days of Thatcher. The clientele of Leicester Polytechnic Students’ Union wore clothes drained to a uniform GREY through over-wearing and poor laundry, lived on a diet of cheap tinned  food and were DRUNK OUT OF THEIR MINDS on pound a pint “wine”. Nobody had a car, we all lived in run down terraced houses, four to a bathroom, and the idea of there being ANY jobs going when we left was laughable.

But - and I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear this - we were happy, THOUGH WE WERE POOR. I had some of the MOST GRATE times of my young life living in a little terraced house on Paton Street in Leicester with Neil, Cathy and Gaynor, eating own-brand foodstuffs and staying up late drinking (and occasionally attempting to smoke) TEA. We didn’t even have a telly  - eee, tell that to The Kids today and they won’t believe you - so we sat around talking a LOT, and one of the things we talked about most was ROCK MUSIC. When we’d moved in Neil and I had both claimed to have been in PUNK ROCK BANDS. If you’ve read recent entries you’ll know precisely how close to the truth this was in my case, and Neil was being similarly creative with the facts. His gigging career to that point amounted to, in his words, “hitting a tree in the playground and shouting ‘PUNK ROCK’”. Once we’d confessed this to each other it wasn’t long before we decided to form a real band ourselves.

This new band, at that point unnamed, was a major step up the musical ladder for me, as Neil could actually play an instrument. All right, he wasn’t the MOST tutored player of all time but I challenge ANYONE, even now, to play a Bar Chord with as much PUNK COMMITMENT as he could. I’d recently given up entirely on playing electric guitar myself as it was too HARD and asked other friends what instrument I should try. They gave me a choice - if I played Drums I’d never be out of offers for gainful employment, but would need to learn to drive a car, whereas bass was… well, playing the bass was a piece of piss.

Thus we ventured out to the local “second-hand” store and part exchanged the guitar Mileage had played in The Masters Of Nothing for a bass guitar which seemed to be made of two different instruments bolted together. That very afternoon we learnt TWO songs - “Freak Scene” by Dinosaur Junior (a song I loved so much I played the recorded version to my NAN… complete with SWEARS) and “New Year’s Day” by U2.

It later turned out that these were the only two songs Neil knew how to play so we very quickly progressed to writing our own material. Our first songs were from our “previous bands” - Neil had a tune called “Morgue Dancing” and I worked out a proper tune for “Rather Spooky” by The Masters Of Nothing - but we soon started writing songs together. We couldn’t afford to go out that much, and it wasn’t like there was any point studying was there?

The first fruits of our collaboration was a song called “She’s A Spaceman”. We LOVED this song and, I must say, I still do now. It’s all about someone going to see their girlfriend, who is a spaceman, and discovering she’s busy, so spending an afternoon drinking tea and eating biscuits with her mum. The biscuity section of the song takes up a surprisingly large amount of the song, almost as much as the chorus which went:

She’s A Spaceman
She’s A Spaceman
She’s A Spaceman
She’s A Space PERSON

It was very much a song of its time. We played and played and played and, before too long, we were ready to go and do so in front of other people. But where were we to make our debut? There were all sorts of gig venues in Leicester but we had no IDEA how to go about getting gigs at any of them and were far too scared to ask.

If only we knew someone who ran a club - a comedy club, say, where the booking policy involved inviting their friends to come and play…

Now that I had become a Stand-Up Comedian it was time to get some GIGS. There are two ways main ways to get decent comedy gigs. The first is to turn up at open mic nights, doing five minutes here and there until you’ve learnt your craft, hoping that a promoter will notice your improvements and start to book you as a first act, and from there move your way up the bill. Playing open mics can take years, years off struggle and determination, not being put off by audiences who don’t care or lack of payment, as you slowly and dedicatedly get better and better.

The second way is to book a room above a pub, invite all your friends to come and say you’re great, and call it a comedy club. Guess which one I went for? Clue: it was called “The Casbah Club”.

Having your own comedy club is GRATE, but if you do it regularly you do tend to need some material, and luckily i had a PAL to help me. I’d first met Mr Simon Wilkinson to speak to in WHSMiths, Leicester where, at the age of 19, he was buying a copy of “Perfect Homes”. Some 20 years later i have STILL yet to tire of reminding him about this.

Simon was ALSO a member of the Poly Poor Theatre Society, and so we ended up doing a SKETCH together in that year’s Rag Revue, one called “Let’s Do Blues” which was a very VERY “A Bit Of Fry & Laurie” sort of affair. It was meant to be a TV show explaining “The Blues” but it very quickly degenerated it me BELLOWING the Masters Of Nothing’s song “Decapitated Blues”, accompanied by an over-excited Simon on Electrical Guitar.

We had so much fun doing this that we decided to become a DOUBLE ACT, and ended up spending a VERY happy year hosting our comedy club. It really was BRILLIANT fun, especially when we settled on a permanent venue and it became a REGULAR event. This meant we could have CATCHPHRASES and, instead of doing brand new material, we could do the same sketches every month with very tiny re-writes. We were, basically, doing The Fast Show ten years ahead of it’s time and, it must be said, significantly less funnily. This didn’t matter of course, as it was just our friends in the audience who would laugh ANYWAY.

This was all well and good until we FORGOT that they were just laughing because they were our friends and came to believe we were OBJECTIVELY HILARIOUS, and so accepted a PROPER GIG at a proper Comedy Venue. Our friend Rak, now The UK’s Leading Voiceover Artiste, was just starting his glittering career and had booked himself some proper stand-up gigs. He’d got one at the Nottingham Playhouse and when the normal support act dropped out he managed to get us on the bill.

We arrived with BIG DREAMS of a BIG BREAK - a comedy impressario was BOUND to be there, was BOUND to SPOT us, and we’d soon be faced with the DILEMMA of what to do - finish our Polytechnic Degrees or throw it all way for a shot at THE BIG TIME?

We needn’t have worried, as we DIED on our ARSES. Stuff that had seemed funny at The Casbah suddenly WASN’T in front of a real live audience. One of our big BITS was “Shop Cop”, which basically went like this:

ME: I’m just off to the loo (RUNS OFF)
SIMON: Oh, that’s a shame, because now it’s Mark’s favourite part of the show - it’s time for SHOP COP!
(enter ME, with a carrier bag on my head)
SIMON: Hello Shop Cop!
ME: Hello Simon, and Hello Shoppers Everywhere!
SIMON: And what have you been looking into this week, Shop Cop?
ME: I’ve been looking into packets of cornflakes.
SIMON: And?
ME: They were full of cornflakes.
SIMON: Thanks Shop Cop!
ME: Thank you Simon, and thank you shoppers everywhere! (RUNS OFF)
SIMON: I wonder where Mark has gone?
ME: Hello Simon, I’m back. Now, it’s time for my favourite part of the show - it’s time for SHOP COP!
SIMON: Oh dear, I’m afraid we’ve done it already.
ME: What? (hits Simon)

I’ve just typed that all out in one go, almost as if we did it SO MANY TIMES that it’s still lodged in my memory. And I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing as I am - how on EARTH could that NOT have launched two fabulous comedy careers? I know, we were shocked too.

After about 10 minutes of this we slunk off, and spent the whole journey back to Leicester complaining to each other about the audience being “dead” (despite the fact that they laughed a LOT at every body else). We decided it was THEIR fault, not ours, and resolved to go back to playing only our OWN gigs until The World was ready for us.

This was a REALLY good idea, both for us AND for The World, because while we waited something ELSE started happening that would change my life forever and, perhaps more importantly, allow The World Of Comedy to carry on without me.

The clarion call of ROCK was about to sound, and I would be POWERLESS to stop myself from answering it. For LO! coming over the horizon was the MIGHTY LEGEND that was the band VOON!

All the way through sixth form I was desperately looking forward to University. I thought it would be a place where Artistic Types would be free to be as fancy and/or poncey as they liked, a mass assemblage of poets and artistes, swapping high level chat over glasses of red wine and forging partnerships that, within weeks of graduation, would become the basis of a whole new generation of WRITERS.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I found out it was exactly like school except with a bar actually INSIDE it. Mind you, maybe that’s what you get when you end up at Leicester Polytechnic.

Undeterred… well, deterred a bit, I decided to have a go at acting out the lifestyle I’d read so much about in Monty Python and Comic Strip biographies, and began submitting sketches to the Rag Society. I thought that’s what everybody would be doing, and would be constantly surprised of a Monday morning when I went to drop off my latest batch of (rather odd) comedy sketches in the Rag pigeon hole to find it completely empty. Little did I know that my drop-offs had become a bizarre source of excitement to the organising committee, and when they eventually met me they were rather taken aback to find out that I wasn’t a crazed maniac with wild burning eyes and a life-expectancy measurable in days, but actually a rather quiet youth from Peterborough. Wearing a cardigan.

Still, they did use a couple of my sketches and through that I got more and more involved in the drama society, which was called The Poly Poor Theatre Company. It was the 1980s, that’s the sort of name we used to give things back then.

I met loads of people through Poly Poor, directly and indirectly, many of whom I’m still best pals with now, including some who would be VITALLY IMPORTANT to me joining a band at all. At this point though I was still intent on becoming a comedian, like Ben Elton, so that, like Ben Elton, I could then move on to scriptwriting. At one point it seemed like this might actually HAPPEN, when I met a gentleman called Robert Rackstraw. Rak, as we all called him, is now, according to Wikipedia “one of the UK’s leading male voice actors” and has been in LOADS of things you’ve actually heard of, like Bob The Builder, but back then he was just starting out, writing scripts and doing voices for local radio. He pretty much took me under his wing and gave me LOADS of advice on places to send my stuff too, and as a result of this I pretty quickly got a script accepted by BBC Manchester.

It was for a show starring the comedy legend Arthur Brown, and I even got to go up to Manchester one day for a brain-storming session. My main memory is that there was one, very pretty, actress who had LOTS of ideas which we all had to be very polite about, especially when she started doing extraordinarily dodgy, borderline racist, accents. I also had a try-out to write for an up and coming young presenter called Jonathan Ross, but for some reason (by that point, probably BEER) never sent back the scripts in time.

The trouble was that despite myself I’d had my eyes opened to a much more exciting life than just sitting in my bedsit with a typewriter. I’d FINALLY started drinking properly and had embarked on my lifelong love affair with BEER and PUBS and, through this, had realised that going out and having friends was a LOT more fun than typing snide jokes about people. Even better, I’d found a way to COMBINE this with my ongoing appreciation of SHOWING OFF. I had become a STAND UP COMEDIAN!

After the triumph of GETTING PAID to do a gig it was all downhill for The Masters Of Nothing.

We had no way of knowing at the time, because the future looked so BRIGHT. We were now an Experienced Gigging Band and had not one, not two, but THREE actual gigs booked up for the summer of 1988. Two of these were, it must be admitted, in our usual stomping ground of our school hall but the third was in a proper venue, a PUB called The Boy’s Head. At that time The Boy’s Head was not only Peterborough’s main (only) indie gig venue (you know the bands you’d read about in the NME? So did the bands who played The Boy’s head) but ALSO a frankly TERRIFYING Irish Pub with a county-wide reputation for VIOLENT CROWDS. What could possibly go wrong?

Before we could get to that, however, there was the small matter of a two night residency at our alma mater. We’d all had SUCH a good time doing our Comic Relief Benefit that we’d decided to go one better and do TWO nights, partly as a farewell to our old school (we’d all just done our ‘A’ Levels), partly in aid of Amnesty International but, mostly, as one last chance to SHOW OFF before we went our seperate ways.

It was a partial success. We did raise SOME money for Amnesty and we did get to say goodbye, but showing off was limited slightly by the fact that almost NOBODY came. As main organiser I’d failed to realise that doing a gig IN school DURING THE SCHOOL HOLIDAYS meant that our usual audience, of SCHOOLCHILDREN, would have no idea it was happening.

So small was the audience  on the first night, and so muted was their reaction, that The Masters Of Nothing threw a ROCK AND ROLL STROP, and REFUSED to play our BIG HIT. It seems ludicrous as I sit and type these words, but it is COMPLETELY TRUE: we really did think that the meagre, quiet crowd did not DESERVE to hear “A Minus Work”, and so we played “Decapitated Blues” instead, saving the “hit” for the final night. We’d been PAID to play a GIG now, we were proper rock stars and, surely, only days away from BEING DISCOVERED, so why SHOULD we pander to them? We did relent the next night, which was just as well as it would prove to be our final gig.

Weeks before when I’d rung The Boy’s Head I’d told them we were “Alternative Comedy” and could happily play two sets of 45 minutes each. When I told the others about this I was confident we could fill the time, despite the fact that over the past FIVE YEARS we had only managed to come up with 25 minutes of material, at least 15 of which would be completely unusuable in the live environment, and the other 10 GUARANTEED to get us our heads kicked in.

Over the next few weeks the other two got increasingly nervous, despite my reassurances. I only started to worry myself when I realised that BOTH our practices had degenerated - as so many of the MOST rock and roll gatherings do - into lengthy games of SCRABBLE without a single new song being worked out. When Mileage and Robin started to BEG me to ring up and cancel the gig I was having none of it, and it was only when they both declared their intention not to turn up and leave me to IMPROVISE 90 MINUTES worth of material that I relented and, bravely, rang the landlord up to tell him we’d all broken our legs. Not the same leg, obviously. That would be ridiculous.

And so the legend that was The Masters Of Nothing came to an end. The three of us dedicated our time together to going to Beer Festivals and, most Christmas Eves for the next twenty years, THE PUB. It’s something we share MUCH more of a natural talent for.

This was a fateful day in My Exciting Life In ROCK, for on June 19th 1988 I became a MAN, not only in LAW but also, and possibly more importantly, in ROCK. For LO! This was the day I did my first ever PROPER GIG.

Back in 1988 I didn’t really have any interest in the bands current at the time, as I was completely in the THRALL of the Alternative Comedy movement. That’s probably why mine and The Masters Of Nothing’s first proper gig wasn’t in a rock venue but a Comedy Club. Looking back I’m amazed that a place like Peterborough, which although containing many lovely people is a pretty dreary, small-minded crappy place, could support a weekly comedy club like The Gaslight, but maybe it was the fact that there really wasn’t anywhere ELSE to go for GOOD TIMES that made it successful. We’d been for a RECCE a few weeks beforehand and seen a comedian called Jack Dee who we all thought might be jolly good, and introduced ourselves to the club’s promoter. I’d arranged our gig by telephone a few weeks before, assuring him that we were an Alternative Comedy Band but from the look on his face when we said hello I don’t think he realised we were so young. He seemed very concerned about how many friends we’d bring - at the time I thought he wanted to make sure we’d be supported, but in later years I realised that he was reassuring himself with one of the central tenets of Promoter’s Wisdom: most bands doing their first gig are rubbish, but they usually bring a HUGE crowd with them.

True to our word we did bring at least ten friends with us, who sat right at the front of the stage. Naively at the time we all thought this was the best place, as you got the best view, but we soon discovered what every comedy club regular knows, that the first row is only the best place if you REALLY like having the piss taken out of you by every single comedian on the bill. Amongst this mob of pals were a couple of people who were Actual Musicians and played in a Real Band. I hope you won’t think any less of me if I confess that I took NO SMALL AMOUNT of DELIGHT from the fact that, even though they could do show-offy things like PLAY INSTRUMENTS and had songs with several DIFFERENT parts in them, we were still doing our first gig several WEEKS before they did there’s. HA!

Also in attendance was my Dad, who was being very supportive of his first born but chose WISELY to sit right at the back of the room and deny any knowledge of the young idiot who looked suspiciously like him who was soon taking to the stage.

My main memory of the actual gig part of the evening was the looks of SURPRISE on the faces of the regulars, and the way their applause dramatically dropped off after the second song, when they realised that we sounded that way on purpose, and weren’t going to get any better. It was certainly a BRAVE performance. Two of our songs were done almost acapella - the first was accompanied by us stamping our feet singing a song about blokes called “Blokes”, the second was a medley of theme tunes from Gerry Anderson shows, accompanied by us slapping our bared stomachs.

You’d think the more traditional musical numbers might have got people on our sides, except that we’d still not got any further with learning to play any instruments. It annoys me when bands claim not to be able to play, and then go on stage with everything plugged in, tuned up and on the right way round to use ACTUAL CHORDS and notes in the right order. We had so little idea of what we were doing we didn’t know there WAS a right way, and made a fresh and exciting sound every time we played because we had no way of making the same noise twice.

We came off to spatterings of applause from our friends and loud sighs of relief from the rest of the room, especially at my Dad’s table. I was relieved to have finished, but was slightly disappointed at the lack of aftermath. There were no A&R men, no talent spotters nor any GURLS who seemed to want to talk to us, let alone discover us and give us a record deal. Had I been LIED to by every Band Biopic I’d ever seen?

Still, we did at least get paid, a whole FIFTEEN POUNDS, and as I would later find out that’s not something that happens every gig. Or, indeed, at most of them.

Undeterred by the fact that several hundred people had made their answer VERY clear and precise - “NO” - when asked if they’d like to see more of The Masters Of Nothing, we decided to PLOUGH BRAVELY ON.

This would become a pattern that has remained with me to this day.

Our next chance for glory came in a particular WHITE HOT Furnace Of Perfomance where many of the biggest bands of today, such as Take That, were first FORGED - the School Assembly. At our school week one class would be given an Important Topic every week and CHARGED with explaining this to their peers. Traditionally this would consist of Improving Readings, Musical Recitals and/or a bit of an old PRAYER, but when it was the turn of the sixth formers a small amount of leeway was allowed.

This generally resulted in Monty Python Sketches and people pretending to be Rik Mayall SQUEEZED vaguely into an explanation of Caring For Friends or Personal Hygiene, usually featuring, for some reason, the cast of SCOOBY DOO. This did not go down very well with the sterner members of staff, and so by the time it was the turn of MY class the whole CONCEPT was on probabation.

We thus decided to explore the theme of “Growing Up” with a rude poem, a Monty Python sketch featuring The Scooby Doo Gang and, as the grand climax, a performance by The Masters Of Nothing. Since our “triumph” at the Comic Relief gig we’d actually worked out a couple more songs and, although none of them were specically ABOUT growing up surely, one might argue, NOTHING was more expressive of adolescence than three idiots titting about with instruments they couldn’t play, SHOUTING?

Thus it was that our compere, THE HEAD GIRL, came onstage after a particularly haphazard take on The Spanish Insquisition and said “There are many problems encountered in growing up, like spots, boyfriends and girlfriends, and having your head cut off. So here are The  Masters Of Nothing to sing a song about decapitation.”

We LEAPT out and launched into a song called “Decapitated Blues”. The first verse went like this:

When I woke up this morning and I thought I should be dead
Because when I woke up this morning I found I had no head
My head had gone off to live with some other body instead

… and carried on in pretty much the same vein with Robin changing the casio keyboard drum pattern every so often and Mileage making a NOISE on the - still untuned - guitar. It was GRATE! The Kids, who could sense this was taking daftness to a WHOLE new level gave us BIG cheers and we were AMAZED to see that even Mr Galvin, the TERRIFYING English Teacher who SCREAMED at us if we were late, was DOUBLED over with laughter.

The very next day a MEMO was issued that was read out to every class. From now on TEACHERS ONLY would be in charge of the content of School Assembly. We had BROKEN the SYSTEM - ROCK AND ROLL!