Bands: The Council

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When Voon came to an end The Council formed very soon afterwards... in fact we did our first gig the very next day after the final Voon gig. It was all a bit dodgy really - Neil left Voon and I carried on with Chris and Simon, then Voon ended and me and Neil go together again in The Council, and did pretty much the same songs. We had a few extra ones that I'd written since he's left though, and several that he'd written during his own time in Bungalow Bill, so it wasn't all the same, and we also dredged up a few songs from our very earliest days playing together, so for that first gig we were able to do two full sets.

We went back to playing the same sort of places we'd played before, with a drum machine, but the songs took a turn for the More Aggressive. We thought we were being punk and mod, but actually we were just getting bitter, I think looking back, as most of the songs are pretty pissed off and about the fact that girls didn't want to sleep with us, and also that other bands we knew were doing better than us. We recorded our first tape in my flat at Kirby Road, shortly after which we did one of our Best Ever Gigs, when we supported Prolapse at The Charlotte one Christmas. It was a fantastic night - we were on top form, the (large) crowd loved us, and afterwards I was forced to go on to a club just to give everybody who thought we were GRATE a chance to say so again.

Goodness knows what was going on - it had never happened before and it certainly never happened again. In all the excitement we asked Tim from Prolapse (who'd been a fan of ours for a while) whether he'd like to join us, and he said yes. We had several practices and then played our first gig together to an audience of about three people. We were also extremely drunk - Tim even fell of his stool at one point.

We recorded another, rather better, tape in an actual studio shortly after this, but then Prolapse started to do really well, so Tim couldn't play with us as often as we'd have liked. We went back to occasionally playing with the drum machine every so often and very gradually started to lose the will to play. We did do three more fantastic gigs though - oddly, The Council seems to have had a very high hit rate of these. The first was when we supported The New Bad Things on my birthday. They were a brilliant band and lovely people and we had a FINE old time. Shortly after that we "headlined" the Abbey Park Festival. In other words we went on last, when normally everybody would have gone home, but this time there was a Dance Tent, which was next door to the Sorted tent, and which closed shortly after we'd started. The area was thus full of people hyped up and not wanting to go home yet, and we were the only entertainment available, so when we went on our tent was full. Unfortunately the tent had been sponsored by a brewery who'd left MASSIVE amounts of free beer back stage so we were out of our mind on BOOZE when we went onstage but still everyone absolutely loved us and I went back onstage at the end to throw my arms open and accept the love of the audience, whilst behind me Tim through his towel out into the baying crowd. Neil was a bit more sober than us, and was worried about the fact that the police were coming to arrest us for playing past our curfew.

Our final gig was supporting Lungleg and The Yummy Fur, for which occasion we decided to dress up as cowboys and play a set of country and western songs. I wrote Clean Girl and Another Man's Laundry (hanging on your line) especially for this evening, and we had a great laugh talking in comedy cowboy voices throughout, which seemed to confuse people. We had plans to go JAZZ for our next gig, but by then John Sims was starting to take up a lot of Neil's time, Tim was out on the road with Prolapse, and I was thus left to get on with doing my own thing instead. It was, to be honest, for the best.

Releases:

Your Haircut
Parks and Gardens Department
Ashtray Heart
Each Pillow Is Tethered Like A Rock
Tarotplane Kandy Korn: The Sorted Records Anthology, Vol. 1
Orange Claw Hammer: The Sorted Records Anthology, Vol. 3

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