BLOW
FOR COLOUR
1985
Life in Leamington Spa
I met Paul Bagulay at college in Edinburgh during my fateful and abortive
piano tuning course. We played alot of music together when we should
have been practicing our tuning techniques. We kept in touch after
I fled the town and went to Cambridge
and he tracked me down there. To cut a long story short, life moves
on and my days in Cambridge were numbered, I ended up moving to a
caravan in East Sussex for a while with my girlfriend before finally
going up to Leamington Spa at Pauls behest to another room in a shared
house..I was kind of miserable again by this time as my girl had gone
away to college far away in Yorkshire and I was now in this town with
a very different vibe to my previous place, I didn't really like it
that much. Thing is tho' me and Paul had a great musical spark firing
at that time, and we hunkered down in that house and started churning
out some songs that were really promising. We got a band together
along with 'Dave' our rock steady drummer and went out gigging around
the local area. We were totally energetic and I had been deeply inspired
by the Talking Heads 'Stop Making Sense' one of the greatest concert
films of all time! I'd seen this film back in Cambridge and people
were dancing in the aisles of the cinema! So, we carried on for a
while, but in retrospect we were getting no-where in the music biz
and we didn't have the wherewithal to get enough gigs or to plan it
properly..it seemed hard to get a gig in Coventry for some reason.
It was the nearest large town..unfortunately.
Anyway,
for equipment we had a naff drum pad thing and the same crappy sounding
Tandy reverb, the X-15 and a Casio CZ-101 synth which was brilliant..and
a single cymbal on the end of a stick that we would record on a seperate
track..hahah! No money as usual but tons of cigs and cups of tea.
I worked as a painter and decorator which was a totally crap job painting
old ladies houses magnolia...and then a slightly better job in an
archeological drawing office housed in an ancient church hall with
another bunch of lovely misfits..I forget where now.
Well
that's it for 'The Blow for Colour' a title we got from randomly looking
through a Sunday magazine.
In the end..feelings were getting strained between me and Paul as
I desperately wanted to go back to live with my girlfriend in Yorkshire
and he wanted to keep the band together....in the end the girl won
out and that was the end of that. Me and Paul stayed friends tho'
and he went on to become pretty successful as one half of a psyche-trance
outfit called 'Manmademan'.
These
great songs were not dead however, and I took them up north with me
for the next chapter of my totally unsuccessful life in music. The
Spoons!
