Sons Of The Stage Part 1: The Band That Kept Changing Its Name

Back in 1989, I was a fifteen-year old kid with no idea of what I was going to do with my life. The only careers that appealed to me were writing and playing in a band. (As it turned out, I've ended up doing both these things, although not at a level which would justify using the word "career"). With a view to the latter, I convinced my folks to shell out for some guitar lessons at school, as well as a nylon-stringed acoustic on which to learn.

The school's guitar teacher was a pretty cool broad called Sheila Stubbs. At this point, I was no good at gauging people's ages if they were older than, ooh, 20, but the pictures in my memory suggest she was in her late 40s. She was quite short, Irish and hipper than the rest of the school staff put together, despite the fact that her husband, who was one of the full-time music teachers, once got so incensed by an advertisement for the first Manic Street Preachers album (featuring a close-up of part of Richey Manic's naked tattooed body) that I expected steam to start coming out of his ears, Beano-style. Sheila rocked a vaguely gothy look, and certainly had enough of the dark side to her that she once invited Jehovah's Witnesses into her home and proceeded to freak them out by going on about how she was a highly experienced witch (when the cat entered the room, she apparently declared "And there's my familiar!"). She also agreed that, once we'd been through the songs in 'The Complete Rock & Pop Guitar Player' and done some blues, she'd procure a Heavy Metal book so we could learn some Metallica.

So the next stage in my journey to musical stardom was to get an electric guitar, which made it to the top of my next Christmas list. I chose a guitar with a black and red crackle/lightning finish, which I thought was the most metal design in Yeovil's guitar shop. This impression lasted until a Sixth Form girl described it as "tortoiseshell". This guitar was to last me for years, albeit in an ever-decaying state - in 2003, a band we were supporting asked to borrow a guitar when they broke a string mid-set, but when handed mine, the guitarist actually refused to use it as it was so knackered after years of abuse.


I don't remember whose idea it was to start a band - OK, it was almost certainly Dominic Fry's idea, as he made the lion's share of the decisions - but I certainly needed little encouragement. For a boarding school, our place of learning was surprisingly amenable to the idea of its inmates starting bands, with portacabins outside the music building available for rehearsals, and occasional "gigs" in the assembly hall or music building. Ambient techno outfit Spooky were alumni of the school (as were Derek Jarman and the guy who invented Connect 4, apparently), but by the time I got there the premier outfit were a metal band whose name is, I'm afraid, lost in the mists of time. I do remember that they advertised a live performance with a poster featuring the cover artwork for Megadeth's Peace Sells...But Who's Buying? album, albeit with their name inscribed on the sign old Vic Rattlehead is leaning on. I think they also put up some individual photos of the band members, including a shot of the drummer (who I believe was called Hamer-Hodges) sticking his tongue out while playing the drums - he was clearly a very metal gentleman indeed. I went to see them play their set in the main room of the music school (in a lunch break, I think?!), where they played a bunch of thrash covers and an instrumental called Music To Gargle At. I took it to be their own creation and quite admired the bold diversion away from Bay Area thrash that it represented, but later discovered that it was almost certainly a cover of an Ozric Tentacles tune. It probably says something, both about the early '90s music scene and about my school, that a band would consider back-to-back Metallica and Ozrics covers.

Mind you, my band's repertoire was to become a pretty broad thing. I should probably introduce the band first, though, right? We've already met Dominic Fry; I was in quite a few classes with him and, if I could be said to have been in any social clique at school (which I'm not sure I was), then it would have been one which included him. He played the bass and was the band's de facto leader. I was on guitar, obviously. On the drums was one Tom Horsfall, who was easily the most handsome member of the band and was therefore closer to the school's mainstream than the rest of us. On vocals was Ben Rowlett, an enigmatic fellow with a wonderfully dry sense of humour. At some point, Keiron Maguire joined on second guitar, though I think the arrangement was pretty much that he'd show up whenever he could be arsed. Keiron was probably the most free spirit in the whole school and gave the impression that his life moved in its own unique way, while the rest of the school or, indeed, the planet, was stuck in boring old linear time and space. The flipside of this was that there was sometimes something slightly unnerving about him, as if he was privy to some cosmic joke that nobody else could possibly understand. Kieron is still playing music, as you can hear here:
http://www.myspace.com/kieronmaguire

We started with covers, including Flower by The Charlatans, Transmission, No Love Lost and She's Lost Control by Joy Division, U-Mass by The Pixies, Head On by The Jesus & Mary Chain and a version of Hole's Teenage Whore (yes, with Ben on vocals - and he did it justice, too). We also covered a song by an unsigned band from Petersfield or somewhere similar called The Lovelies. The tune was called Hippy Trippy and we'd heard it because one of the members of the band was the older brother of a kid at school. I think this kid once asked us not to play it any more as it might put people off his brother's band. Undeterred, we recorded our one and only music video for it, which involved us emerging from the music building's fire doors and miming badly to it. Influenced by a surreal, no-budget Pavement video I'd seen on 'The Chart Show', I wore a velvet jacket and put coat hangers on my guitar head. Before the song was even over, a teacher who lived opposite the building has emerged to bollock us for ruining his Sunday afternoon. If anybody reading this has a copy of the video, please upload it to YouTube.

You'll notice that up until now I've not mentioned the name of this band. The thing is, we kept changing it. I think we started as Middle-Class Grasp, which was probably supposed to be a political statement - you'd have to ask Dom - but was obviously rubbish (not to mention the fact that people kept thinking we were saying "Middle-Class Grass"). There is now a band called Middle Class Rut, which is just about acceptable, although they sometimes shorten it to MC Rut, which makes me think they should be hyping the crowd at a drum'n'bass night.

Anyway, our next moniker was Captain Swing, and this was definitely political, Captain Swing being the name used to sign threatening letters sent out to landowners during a period of anti-threshing machine riots in rural England in 1830. Yes, we were paying attention in History classes, and, no, none of the tunes we played were remotely political. Unfortunately, we realized that, unless you were in our history class, you'd assume that the "Swing" in our name referred to a jaunty musical quality, making this as bad a name as, say, Colonel Funk or Lieutenant Groove. Here's a link to show you which kind of band might name themselves Captain Swing...
http://www.captainswing.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Clearly tired of the soapbox, but not of eminently stupid names, our final incarnation was as Nine Inch Snails. We thought this was pretty fucking funny.

Along from our video shoot, we did manage to make some other public appearances. We played the school's annual gig in the immense assembly hall - still the biggest stage I've been on and likely to remain so, I fear - alongside Manifest, a band from the year below who specialized in covers of the big rock/metal bands of the day (G'n'F'n'R, Metallica, Black Crowes, that sort of thing), who were clearly much better at their instruments than us and took things a good deal more seriously too. There was a strange policy for the night whereby each band would play half their set, then let the other play half of theirs. (I think there might have been a headline band from outside the school, maybe Bournemouth shoegazers Flood, but that might have been a different year.) Anyway, in the gap between our two half sets, Ben was busted for smoking by one of the teachers. We were all seventeen or eighteen, but while Ben was legally allowed to smoke in the real world, such activity on school grounds was liable to get you detention or early morning litter duty or some such. When he returned, he inserted a stream of freestyle invective against said teacher into one of the tunes (I think it was either No Love Lost or Teenage Whore), in place of the actual lyrics. Amazingly, we didn't get immediately shut down; in fact, I'm guessing that nobody in authority was really paying close attention to what was going on - it's all noise, anyway.

The only other Nine Inch Snails show I can remember was a smaller scale affair towards the end of the Sixth Form. There was, barely credibly, an actual bar in the school grounds, probably to prevent kids from going out into the surrounding towns and villages to sample their wares with no teachers on hand to monitor their alcohol consumption. Obviously, loads of us went to pubs in the surrounding towns and villages, but the Sixth Form Bar had its advantages, principally the cheapest drinks I've ever paid for. There was a limit on how much we could drink - a mere one pint for the Lower Sixth, or two for the Upper Sixth. However, somebody had made the fatal flaw of allowing Upper Sixth Form boys to work the bar alongside an actual adult, so if it was your mate they simply wouldn't put a mark next to your name when serving you a pint, so long as the adult barman's back was turned.

The bar itself was a prefab building with two rooms, one with the actual bar and some seating and the other with some form of table-based sport entertainment and a stereo. It was in the latter that Nine Inch Snails made our last stand. By this point we'd actually started writing our own material; the tunes I can remember were Inertia (written by me, pretty shoegazey) and Cicada's River (written by Dom and quite PJ Harvey-influenced), though I think we had another two or three tunes. I remember feeling it was a shame that we were inevitably splitting up, what with us all off to different unis in the autumn, as we were actually starting to come together as a band rather than a bit of a lark. I'm pretty sure that most of the kids out that night stayed in the other room, though.

Well, that's a suitably downbeat place to leave things. Future blogs will deal with the rest of my musical output, starting with Southampton University's one and only Carp Fever...