I dig them up from the end of the 70s and wrap them in the daily mail before transforming into a 6-legged pantomime dromedary whereupon a malapropped oaf bangs his clavicle with a crucifix and it’s 3-2. after that you try and prise open the door with a boot scraper and an elfin twig basher rolls the boden catalogue into the road and we all drop to the floor like bruised monkeys at clacton where the high tide spills over the car park like black milk. is this something that has already been discussed? I had to mention it to eugene because he is the lord god of the known world and everything must be mangled through his immense brain portal immediately like so I’m just checking. you know. they do their own thing. we do ours. except we don’t go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how wrong yours is and how right mine is and anyway I’ve looked at your own website and it’s rubbish right? we couldn’t do the other one because our internal organs were playing musical cavities and we’d lost the knob.
it was only 1976 when danno was hoiking his FS1E round the playing fields churning up sods and giving two fingers to the head he was an easter leaver you see so incumbent on hair-drying the flatlands he bespoke a jackson pollock on the geography block wall and punched a goalkeeper just before a jumper for goalpost got mangled in his spokes and the smell of burning acrylic wafted over earlham like a pall of doom. but twas the least of things when not the night before the barn fire of the vanities was out of control on the outskirts of sprowston and two-wheeled heliotropes barged through the melee wielding axle grinders and pumps for the sake of our skin whereupon we rolled uncontrollably under the tracks of a tank on super 8 while 17 bags of rubbish tried to get into tramps with jeans on
we were almost just sitting around and having a nice cup of tea in the dark as waily captain beefheart lookalike departed the stage to a single clap and relative to a norwich appreciation level that was a deafening roar considering there must have been at most 90 of us packed into the waterfront with maybe 10 square feet each to ourselves so when it all kicked off and we thronged, guardian reader-like, to the crush barriers at the front, I almost knocked someone’s deck chair over and woke them up.
we assembled as usual at the altar of Robyn Hitchcock looking our customary socially inadequate and middle-class dad selves and all did that little nod and hopelessly off time dance step which doesn’t involve much more than moving your head backwards and forwards and occasionally punching the air at waist height while ironically and whimsically smiling to yourself because you know all the words to the songs from Perspex Island. only this time is wasn’t just a guitar and morris slapping the bongos in falsetto, it was the latest roving incarnation of a rock royalty support band in the shape of the Venus 3, who, as Robyn points out, are 3/4 of R.E.M. and 3/5 of the Minus 5 or something as it is made up of Peter Buck, Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey who all feature on the Olé Tarantula album which made up about a quarter of the set which also included a selection box of previous solos and enough Soft Boys to keep the hardcore, which in this case means old, happy, and the usual rambling english intellectual twitness from one of the archetypal english eccentrics, who happens to have most of the others featured on the album or co-writing
as R.E.M. are having a year off, most of them are touring tiny clubs as the Venus 3 in front of about 100 people at a time and when do you get to stand 10 feet from Peter Buck as he changes electric 12-strings for fun and rips power chords and byrdsy twangdangles looking like he wishes he could do it like this all the time? well, actually, he looked like somebody had just told him his cat had been sucked into an irony vortex and the challenge for the evening was to see if he ever curled his lip. but he never does. even after the gig when he’s stood behind a formica table with a few robyn cds because they left the merchandise in brighton and is surrounded by about 15 of us telling him how great it was, he still looks like he’s been slapped by the invisible man. I mean, I know he’s having a ball really.
it’s not about R.E.M. though. long before things went all Green, R.E.M. and Robyn were already mutually respectual, as the Virtual Brighton magazine notes: Beginning as a strummer in Cambridge’s folk clubs, Hitchcock developed into a bandleader, heading up folk-pop iconoclasts the Soft Boys, one of alternative rock’s least sung but most influential bands. Yet by the time bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements quoted the Soft Boys as a major influence, Hitchcock had moved on to what would become his distinguished solo career. In other words, people were here to see Robyn Hitchcock. The support band were something of a novelty. a good one though. The BBC Oxford site sums up the whole things pretty nicely, but then again, Michael Stipe joined them on stage at the Zodiac and Thom Yorke was in the audience.
they’re full again. hallelujah. look, a baby in the back going to castle mall with mum and dad. that’s nice. it’ll arrive tomorrow. that man’s looking at me funny. time to start on the kitchen. I’ll go three times a week. perhaps he’s waiting to go fishing. january 12th then. bop it. nice hair. they’re coming back already. only two bottles of red. he looks like something out of the sweeney. blue peter best of the year. stop looking at me. hahaha, look at the state of that. office furniture. where’s my sun ray?
d’you know. it was the funniest little cinema I’ve ever been in. I have to turn off when they clamp his eyes open. I was a droog in my head back then. but then I started writing poetry about it and on a marina in the south of france I realized I wasn’t much cop. more like james joyce on cbbc. ulyssless.
