My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): 12/9/99 - The Princess Charlotte / 19/9/99 - The Durham Ox

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As I've said before, it's a LOT easier to be in a band when you're a teenager than it is in your late twenties or thirties. As a YOUTH you can leap onto a train or into a VAN at an hour's notice, pausing briefly to wonder what excuse you'll use when you ring in sick tomorrow, looking forward to a late night where a sofa to sleep on is a luxury beyond avarice and remembering to take a clean t-shirt makes you LORD OF ORGANISATION. As one MATURES, however, things start to change, and the cohesion of band that formed in simpler times will start to CRUMBLE. If all you ever set out to do was ROCK your Management Model will struggle when, actually, you could do with a good night's sleep, the bass player's just had a baby and the drummer's got a breakfast meeting.

Happily for us, The Validators formed when were ALREADY becoming MATURE and so from the very beginning we set in motion MODULAR PROCESSES that, in theory, would remove any stress. The idea was that we could play with ANY combination of band members, so if one or two of us couldn't make it there'd be no problem. We'd be like one of those GIANT ROBOTS, where two motorbikes make a Robot Falcon but all five vehicles together make the ELECTRONIC GORILLA MONSTER.

And yes, that's precisely how I imagined it.

We first tried this out at the last ever LollopaLeicester gig, which me and Sorted Supremo Dave Dixey had booked in the upstairs room at The Princess Charlotte. I love playing in Upstairs Rooms, they're a much warmer, friendlier prospect than The Proper Gig Room, tending to be less sticky, less noisy, and less painted like a 13 year-old goth's bedroom, and this was a lovely example of the form. I'd played some of my earliest solo gigs there and also DANCED many ludicrous nights of DANCING away at the clubs they'd had up there, so decided that, as many of the nascent Validators and none of the Durham Ox Singers could make it, we'd go for an "acoustic vibe".

As ever when people go for an "acoustic vibe", all this really meant was that we couldn't fit all of Tim's drums up the stairs, but it was a lovely gig all the same. As FATE would have it the night featured 80% of the final Validators line-up, with Tom on Violin and Frankie Machine rather marvellously walking from the back of the room up to the stage playing his trumpet for the final song. It was a brilliant night, and I had high hopes that the next string of MODULAR GIGS would be equally as enjoyable.

Of course, they weren't. A week later I played one of the regular benefit gigs at The Durham Ox (I think it was for a crisis in Eastern Europe, but honestly have no idea), and thought it'd be a good idea to continue the experiment by dragging Tom along to play with me. It WAS a good idea in a way, as it meant there was at least one other person in the room who was listening to what I was playing, which was rather handy when I did an IMPASSIONED and IGNORED version of "Fucking Hippy" to a room full of them. The Ox was usually a LOVELY pub, but nights like that do tend to attract FOLKIES. You know the sort - they'll turn up at ANY GIG and ask to play "just a couple of songs" EACH of which will last AT LEAST fifteen minutes, consist of the SAME TWIDDLY BIT played over and over again accompanied by STERN FACES and OVER WROUGHT singing, all dusted with a gentle covering of IMMENSE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS. They get ESPECIALLY upset if anyone talks during their set, and do GLARING, but will happily BRAY ON at high volume whenever anyone else is playing.

They are almost uniformly TEACHERS.

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