Confession time: I mainly went down to Avail's first STE show on May 25th, 1995, because of Smog (UK). I'd become quite good friends with them since seeing them with Skimmer and Bob Tilton a few months earlier. At some point around this period, I went round to bassist Matt's flat to interview them for The Edge, the expanded music supplement to Wessex News which a few of my fellow English students and I were readying for the autumn, and in which I also printed Smog frontman Stu's review of then-hyped all-girl Britpop/punk band Fluffy, which included the choice sentence, "No one had a good word to say about them apart from the old bloke in the raincoat who was hanging around the ladies toilets."
The Avail gig came after the end of the summer term, but I decided to delay heading back to Somerset to see Smog play again (the deal on our student house was that we officially had it until September). I seem to recall a week or so of hanging around with not much to do, spending time with my friend Sophie McElroy (not the Sophie I'd been going out with - I'll relate the end of that relationship next time).
I'd bumped into Matt Smog in the street, and he'd enthused about the band they were playing with. "I don't normally like hardcore," he'd said, confusing me with this crazy talk, "but Avail are really good."
But before Avail, and before even Smog (UK), came opening band Muckspreader. It has been proven by a consortium of scientists, linguists and cultural commentators that Muckspreader is the perfect name for a band who come from the West Country, play cider-thrash punk and decided, on that May evening in 1995, to wear dresses onstage. The name Muckspreader also sounds nearly as good hollered in a West Country accent as the name Haywire - more on that next time, too. On the basis of an internet search I just did, it appears that Muckspreader included in their ranks one Spider, a former drummer for seminal crust-metal outfit Amebix, a band who I'm fairly confident never wore dresses onstage.
I did such a good job of describing Smog (UK) last time that I don't really have too much to add here, so let's move on to Avail. This bunch hailed from Richmond, Virginia, and it's hard not to feel that their Southern roots had an impact on the kind of hardcore they played. This wasn't the tough guy moshcore of New York, the post-hardcore of 90s DC or the pop punk of California, though it had elements of all three (and they were signed, at this point to Lookout, which in a hundred years time the feral creatures who make up post-apocalyptic humanity will still probably know as the original home of Green Day). The cliche about Avail is that their sound was blue collar hardcore, but dammit, that fits pretty well. They had the intensity to satisfy fans of more typical hardcore, but also a melodic, work song sensibility which looked backwards to Johnny Cash, Leatherface, Jawbreaker, John Cougar Mellencamp and Violent Femmes (the last two of whom provided them with cover version material) and forwards to Against Me!, Strike Anywhere and even At The Drive-In, who'd be compared to them on the flyer for their own Joiners show a few years later.
In '95, they were two albums in, with Satiate and Dixie already in the bag. Footage from the time (see below) reveals a pretty young-looking bunch, with frontman Tim Barry sporting dreads and cheerleader Beau Beau substantially less hairy than in the future. Ah yes, Beau Beau - how could I get this far into a discussion of Avail without mentioning the strange figure who stood onstage with Avail every night contributing nothing musically bar the occasional backing vocal, but everything in terms of atmosphere and visual identity?
Speaking of atmosphere, The Joiners was a great place to be that night. Back when I was going to see Carter and the Neds, I was quite used to going down the front to do what I guess we called moshing back then - not the slamdancing variety, more being jammed into a mass of people and pogoing whether you wanted to or not, while a steady stream of crowdsurfers kicked you in the head. Ah, great days... However, since moving to Southampton I'd become accustomed to fairly reserved audiences at The Joiners. This certainly wasn't the case for Avail, but in comparison to the windmilling martial artists who regularly ruin hardcore shows, the pit was good-natured and inclusive, with violence replaced by the curious custom of pigpiling (basically, people piling on top of each other in a big mound of bodies - it was a lot more fun than that sounds). I'm fairly sure I still held back on this occasion, though, unfamiliar with the tunes and still perhaps feeling a tad out of place at STE shows.
The gig was immediately discussed as one of the all-time great STE shows, and the band evidently agreed, as they made sure to return a little over a year later when touring their third album, 4AM Friday. I'm sure I heard at the time that they'd personally requested that Smog played with them again, although I'm quite sure they didn't also ask for openers Portiswood, who featured local scenesters Cov John, PJ, Tony Suspect and Rut, and whose name was a cunning pun linking Soton area Portswood with a certain trip hop band. They weren't trip hop, clearly. Hear their stuff here:
http://web.mac.com/tonysuspect/Suspect_Device/Music.html
I suspect that 4AM Friday is most people's favourite Avail record (mine was still to come), and with a batch of great new tunes and an audience primed and ready, they could hardly fail to tear the place down once again. This time, even I got involved in the pigpiling. Here's some footage from a German show about a week later.
Avail returned to the Joiners for their third and final STE show in 1998. Sadly, I've been unable to unearth who else was on the bill, but with another excellent album, and my personal favourite, Over The James, in the bag, this show completed a mighty hat-trick of Southampton Avail shows.
In the meantime, Avail had insinuated themselves into my life in funny little ways. In early 1997, a new kid at work broke the ice by mentioning that he'd seen me at an Avail gig. That was Jimmy Martin, who I'd go on to join a band with (who sounded nothing like Avail, natch) and who remains a good friend 15 years later. When I started a fairly unsuccessful mini-career of DJing in alternative clubs in Southampton with my friends Ben Mason and M.A. Tovey, I'd regularly spin Scuffle Town by Avail, mainly to disinterested goths but occasionally to more receptive punk types.
The goths might not have been paying attention, but other people evidently were. The band were snapped up by Fat Wreck Chords and released their fifth album, One Wrench, in 2000. Touring the UK as support to Snapcase, they didn't make it to Southampton, so a bunch of us made the trip over to the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth instead. There's little doubt that some of the intimacy we'd enjoyed previously was lost at a slightly bigger venue, but at the same time it was good to see Beau Beau have more stage to play with, scaling speaker stacks, playing air guitar on a mic stand and at one point jumping into the crowd, watching the band for a little while and, turning to the guy next to him, motioning towards the stage with his thumb with a "They're pretty good, aren't they?" expression on his face, before jumping back onstage. The band also made some positive comments about their Southampton friends in attendance, which I'm sure went down very well with the Pompey crew. By this point freelancing for a national music paper, I filed a review which was less an objective view of the night in question than an attempt to sell the band to people who'd been turned on to American rock by the likes of ATD-I, QOTSA and, er, ...AYWKUBTTOD. Snapcase didn't have a hope of following Avail, but the bands evidently got on pretty well; a Kerrang! feature on the tour (written, I think, by Rae Alexandra, herself a veteran of several crucial UK punk zines like Fracture) revealed that Beau Beau had got himself a tattoo to mark the occasion, featuring two cigarettes crossed over a vegan cookie, symbolising the alliance of the drinkin' and smokin' Avail and the straight-edge Snapcase. Still not sure how you can differentiate between vegan and non-vegan cookies in the medium of ink on flesh, mind...
One Wrench wasn't as good a record as the three which had preceded it, however, and the band also missed Erik Larsen behind the kit, who'd left to concentrate on his other band Alabama Thunderpussy. The last Avail record, 2002's Front Porch Stories, played up the downhome, country elements of the band's sound, and while a good record, it couldn't match the band's 90s output. When they toured it with Ensign, I got to see them one last time in a small venue. They played Brighton's Freebutt in April 2003 on, I think, the day after that year's ATP Festival. I wasn't yet living in Brighton, but we were staying with Anna's folks on the way back to Southampton, so I hopped on a train to see Avail. I was too knackered to properly enjoy it, but it was great to see them back in a small room (even smaller than the Joiners, I think!). My last Avail gig, but also my first time at the Freebutt, so I guess it was both the end of something and the beginning of another period of my life.
After Front Porch Stories, Avail carried on playing in the US for a few years before going on one of those fashionable "indefinite hiatuses", with Tim Barry embarking on a solo, acoustic-driven career somewhat in the vein of his peer Chuck Ragan of Hot Water Music. This has become a pretty standard escape route for old punks who've lost their youthful energy, but it feels like a logical progression for Barry.
Maybe, with Hot Water Music just one of a current wave of punk rock reformations which also includes At The Drive-In, Refused and perhaps Jawbreaker, Avail will be tempted to hit the road again. If they do, I'll definitely be there. Especially if Rich Levene puts them on in Southampton one more time...
Next time, something completely different: techno.
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