My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): Artists Against Success (the early years)

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It's a true FACT of my life that rotten gigs often lead to wonderful things ... which luckily means I've had a LOT of wonderful things in my life. As I mentioned last time, one of these things was the formation of a record company, the name of which was Artists Against Success.

The name of the label causes some people terrible distress. "How can you be against SUCCESS?" they bleat. "Surely all musicians want to be succesful?" Well, it depends what you mean by "succesful" I guess - the name was originally used for a night I used to run at The Magazine, a brilliant pub in Leicester which has, like so many brilliant pubs in Leicester, now been knocked down and replaced by student residences. Personally i think Leicester could do with LESSENING the number of students nowadays and INCREASING the number of brilliant pubs, but hey! i am an ex-pat and obviously not to be listened to.

Anyway, the Mag was a fantastic place in the early nineties, where everybody in bands would go for beer and gossip. It was run by an Anarchist Collective, which meant that everything was painted in the anarchist colours of red and black, and so looked like you were inside Dennis The Menaces' bedroom. Every available surface was coated in posters, either for local bands or Great Women In Black History, there were free condoms on the bar, the food was all vegan, and every policy decision was discussed at weekly staff meetings, where their accountant, Merlin, would produce financial reports on his Jupiter 32. It was a beautiful place, and perhaps it was inevitable that it wouldn't last long - the day they allowed sausages on the menu was a porky death knell.

It wasn't all beauty though - as I say, people from ALL kinds of bands would go, so along with us Young Indie Rebels there were a lot of FUNK bands, METAL bands, and general Soundcheck Fascists who'd spend HOURS getting the treble JUST right on the vocals, so that if Mr Big from Big Records came to see them he'd be impressed by their Professional Attitude. These people saw "success" as the ONLY reason for being in a band, and by this they meant making money. If you want to make money from being in a band it's very simple - form a covers band and play the clubs. Otherwise get a proper job to pay for the BEER, have some FUN, and make music you actually WANT to, rather than that which will ADVANCE your CAREER. To put it another way, you can be Johnny Borrell, or you can be John Otway.

I decided, quite logically, that the thing to do was ANNOY these sort of people right back, so when I started up a regular night of my own in The Mag's upstairs room I called it "Artists Against Success" and printed MANIFESTOES as posters which basically SLAGGED OFF half the people in the pub, loudly proclaiming the superiority of drunken incompetence over technical EPTNESS. Dave, the Landlord of The Mag (although, of course, he never used such a feudal patriarchal term himself) thought this was GRATE, as he had to put up with those sort of idiots every day, so gave me a page in the pub's own newsletter in which I banged on about it even further, decrying ability and applauded ham-fisted negligence of instruments. It was VERY OBVIOUSLY meant to be humorous, but the po-faced funk goons were ENRAGED, and DEMANDED to know how on EARTH i could be so anti-musical.

I'd like to say the actual gigs were a FLAMING TORCH OF PUNK INTEGRITY but, actually, they were even more drunkenly inept than I'd claimed. On one notable occasion I was too pissed to stand up so sat down to play... and fell off my stool. There were usually less people in the audience than on stage , and on the final evening I had to scour local pubs looking for the actual performers, who were hiding from me.

We did have one moment of GREATNESS, mind you. Many moons ago in Leicester there was an event called The Abbey Park Festival, usually a stage in a local park where local bands would play one Saturday in front of surprisingly large amounts of local people. It was traditional for bands to send in demo tapes and then spend the rest of the year moaning about the fact that they'd not go play - simple MATHS meant that only a few of the MANY bands around at that time would get on the bill, but it was a LOT more fun to make out it was a gigantic conspiracy. Shortly after I'd started the AAS nights I sent in my tape as usual, including a bit of biographical information in it, details of AAS and also of the... er... Rock Opera i was writing.

Let's not get into that. Move on.

A couple of days later I got a call from the Abbey Park organiser, who'd obviously read my letter at high speed. "Yes, we're very interested in this Artists Against Success Musical you're writing!" she said. "Er... oh yes?" I answered. "Yes! We love the fact that you're getting all these people from different bands to write a musical and we'd love to put it on - what's it about?" "Um... The History of Life on planet earth from start to finish?" "BRILLIANT! You can perform it in Town Hall Square, we'll sort out the PA and lights, and we'll send you some expenses money!"

A contract to perform this musical soon arrived so I spent the next weekend rounding up everyone I knew in Leicester bands and persuading them that a) it was a good idea and b) they should take part because c) I'd signed the contract by then. We put everyone's name in a hat and then randomly drew them out into NEW, different bands. We then changed everyone around so that there were no bands with 5 drummers and people who hated each other weren't playing together. That bit took an especially long time. Once that was done we gave each group a couple of sections of history to write about and then off everyone went to get on with it.

It was beautiful - for the next two weeks practice rooms were full of brand new bands writing brand new songs, and the pubs RANG with chatter of this new experiment. Come the day itself everything went off perfectly, as we presented an hour of slightly deranged shouting about life as it had been lived on planet earth, and I must say I think the confused old lady, three toddlers and the SEVERAL passing shoppers who saw it enjoyed it very much.

My favourite thing of ALL though was when we all went to the pub afterwards and I spent all the money we'd been given on THE BIGGEST ROUND EVER. HOORAH! It was a proud achievement, and one we were not to equal. The next year a much smaller group of us performed "Leicester's GRATE!" in the corner of a pub to much lesser effect, but by then things had changed - the scene, as described elsewhere, felt like less fun, and I was off and away to the bright lights of London and DERBY, where the record company version of AAS was starting to form.

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