2012 as it appeared in my ears and eyes

So, here's my review of 2012, written a couple of days into 2013. Obviously, magazines tend to publish these around late November, while yer average website will be posting by the middle of December. But I like to leave it until the dust's settled, at least partly because I can't give up on the idea of discovering one last Good Thing before the year shuffles off. Now it's done, I feel able to reveal...


MY TOP 20 ALBUMS OF THE YEAR
No more splitting into Kerrang!/non-K! lists; with writers' Top 20s only published on the website this year, it seems time to combine my traditional two lists into one...

1. Swans - The Seer

2. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Lost Songs

3. Orbital - Wonky

4. Neurosis - Honor Found In Decay

5. Gallon Drunk - The Road Gets Darker From Here

6. Dragged Into Sunlight - Widowmaker

7.  Hot Chip - In Our Heads

8. Purity Ring - Shrines

9. Why? - Mumps, Etc

10. Earth - Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light II

11. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Meat & Bone

12. Kendrick Lamar - Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City

13. Grimes - Visions

14. Black Breath - Sentenced To Life

15. Six Organs Of Admittance - Ascent

16. Gojira - L'Enfant Sauvage

17. Carlton Melton - Photos Of Photos

18. Necro Deathmort - The Colonial Script

19. Torche - Harmonicraft

20. Future Of The Left - The Plot Against Common Sense

TOP 10 TUNES OF 2012

1. Angel Haze - New York

2. Six Organs Of Admittance - Waswasa

3. TNGHT - Higher Ground

4. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Pinhole Cameras

5. Orbital - Beelzedub

6. Neurosis - Casting Of The Ages

7. Hot Chip - Look At Where We Are

8. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead -Up To Infinity

9. Gallon Drunk - A Thousand Years

10. Necro Deathmort - Endless Vertex

GIGS OF 2012 (alphabetical order)
This list might not make it look like it, but I definitely went to fewer shows in 2013. Just trying to balance my life a bit better, and make sure that Anna doesn't take last billing after gigs, band stuff, writing, work, etc. Seems like DIY punk shows and Colin's TST gigs came off the worst of it, which I shall certainly endeavour to change in 2013. Already plenty to look forward to, with tickets sorted for Metz, Ghost/Gojira, China Drum (!), Swans and Muddy Roots Europe in Belgium, plus a bunch more shows coming up, but before all that... here's a bunch of gigs which, at this rate, you'll be reading about on this blog in about ten years...



Anacondas @ The Hope
 ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead/Maybeshewill @ The Scala

Anthrax @ Download 
Bellowhead @ The Dome 
Broker @ The Hope
Burning Times @ The Green Door Store
Carlton Melton/Working Man Noise Unit/Jungfrau @ The Prince Albert
Crypsis @ The Prince Albert and The Cowley Club
The Dillinger Escape Plan @ The Concorde 2
The Dirt Daubers @ The Prince Albert and The Haunt 
Eagleburner @ The Prince Albert
Earth @ The Haunt 
Faustus @ All Saints Centre, Lewes 
Fucked Up @ The Haunt
Future Of The Left @ The Haunt
Gallon Drunk @ Sticky Mike's Frog Bar
Ginger @ Download
Gnarwolves @ The Hydrant and The Green Door Store 
Gojira @ Islington Academy
Hawk Eyes @ Download
Kraken Mare @ Bar 42, Worthing
Kylesa/Circle Takes The Square/Deafheaven/Ken Mode @ The Haunt
Larry & His Flask @ The Hydrant  
Latterman @ The Green Door Store
Th'Legendary Shack Shakers @ The Haunt 
Lesbian/Manatees/Blackstorm @ The Prince Albert
Meshuggah @ The Concorde 2 
Metallica @ Download
Neurosis/Godflesh @ The Forum
Orbital @ The Corn Exchange
Pettybone/Trieste/State Icons/Witch Cult @ The Green Door Store
Ramesses @ Sticky Mike's Frog Bar
Rolo Tomassi @ The Concorde 2 
The Sadies @ The Hydrant
Sea Bastard @ The Cowley Club, The Haunt and Sticky Mike's Frog Bar
Shearwater @ The Haunt and Sticky Mike's Frog Bar
Sleep Committee @ The Green Door Store and The Hydrant
Sloath @ The Cowley Club
Spiers & Boden @ The Komedia
Touche Amore @ The Hydrant
Devin Townsend @ Download
Turbonegro @ Download
While She Sleeps @ Download

BEST PROMO SHOT OF 2012: CHRIS DE BURGH

2012 ON THE BOX

1. THE BRIDGE/THE KILLING

Given that my 2011 telly round-up gave top billing to The Killing, it seems fairly predictable that The Bridge would similarly tickle my fancy for Nordic Noir. But while Scando-gloom has become something of a cliched viewing pleasure for Guardianista types, The Bridge immediately justified any pre-release hype, while displaying as many of its own idiosyncracies as it did similarities with its predecessor. Yes, it was set in Copenhagen... but also in Malmo, the titular construction being the one linking Denmark and Sweden. Yes, it had a socially awkward female protagonist in Saga Noren, with a distinctive mode of dress (leather trousers replacing patterned sweaters, though not, one suspects, on Scandophile Radio Times readers)... but she shared lead duties with burly Danish fella Martin Rohde, an earthy counterpoint to her unworldly character. Martin has a fantastic laugh - not a sound you hear often in The Killing, and a clue to the fact that The Bridge has moments of genuine humour amidst the gloom.

The killing element of The Bridge appears to be a less personal one than in, er, The Killing; as in the latter's second series, we're in serial killer mode here, but in The Bridge each of his atrocities is designed to highlight a different element of society's inequalities. These are fed through journalist Daniel Ferbe, a brilliant portrayal of a talented but arrogant hack; breaking away from The Killing's political characters, the rest of The Bridge's curious array of characters include a social worker (who looks amazingly like a 70s porn star), a homeless woman, Martin's family, a guy Saga picks up on one of her romance-free sex trawls, a dying millionaire and his wife and plenty more. It's not always initially clear how, or whether, these people are related to the case, and when a character's relevance has passed, they simply fade from view. There are long stretches of the first episode which seem to have little to do with the murder case, making it feel more like an arthouse film than another The Killing, but this is another series which tightens its grip slowly. In the Saga/Martin double act, it's also got one of the best non-romantic male-female teams in telly since... jeepers, help me out here!

The Killing also returned for one last round of darkened warehouses, Machiavellian political plotting and tenacious, driven perpetrators. Like the second series, this could have more accurately been called The Killings, as we were once again dealing with a vengeful serial killer. To be honest, when a character got booted off a rooftop with a noose round his neck early on, I was kinda longing for the first series, with its meditations on grief taking precedence over Big Eye-Catching Murder Scenarios. But The Killing III actually held together better than the second series, with the parents of an abducted child providing the human context slightly missing from the middle instalment and a more charismatic bunch of politicos (though I had a soft spot for II's Thomas Buch). And while sticking with the ten-episode formula of the second series, this managed to cram in the most complex plot of all, with the murderer/abductor trying to learn the truth behind a previous abduction/murder...

As the last series, this was also significant as a send off for Sarah Lund. Appropriately, her mother and son are the only other recurring characters (besides amusingly stern-faced top cop Brix), and possibilities are laid throughout for her post-series happiness, with hunky old flame Mathias Borch in the picture and a grandchild on the way. Does she get her happy ending? Does PM Kristian Kamper do the right thing? Does businessman/father of abducted child Robert Zeuthen put his family first in the end? Is justice visited upon the original perpetrator? Well, clearly I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to wait for the last moments and that distinctive, tense music to sound for the last time...

Oh, and a little bit of trivia: the guy playing the PM's brother/advisor Stoffer is better known in Denmark as a stand-up, which is why I found a picture of him doing this. Crazy guy, right?

2. SHERLOCK

Nearly left off this list for the simple reason that it feels like ages since it screened, but Sherlock was in fact on the box in January 2012. The character of Sherlock Holmes is obviously about the place a lot these days - in Guy Ritchie's Downey Jr-starring version and the Jonny Lee Miller US TV incarnation - but it's Miller's Frankenstein co-star Benedict Cumberbatch who's made the character his own, with this second series even better than the first. Lara Pulver (a bit lacking in Spooks, but much more convincing here) and Russell Tovey gave excellent support in the first two episodes, while Martin Freeman's Watson and, especially, Andrew Scott's feverish, dementoid Moriarty, continued to make the strongest of impressions upon the legendary characters they portrayed. The re-tellings of old stories crackled with invention, Holmes' deductions proved ever more brilliant, and the series went out with the sort of cliffhanger designed to stay in people's heads for the eighteen months or so that we'll have had to wait by the time the third series airs later in 2013.

3. LINE OF DUTY

So, last year I gave props to classy, talent-laden Brit crime drama The Shadow Line... and this year I'm doing the same for classy, talent-laden Brit crime drama Line Of Duty. They even share a word in the title, for God's sake... But who cares if I'm becoming predictable; this was a rip-roaring tale of corruption and deceit with fine performances from some of telly's best actors (Lennie James, Vicky McClure and Martin Compston chief amongst them). The heavy-handed allusions to the evils of red tape occasionally grated, but were offset by regular excursions into massively OTT ultraviolence, with throat-slitting and finger removal a speciality. Throughout was a sense of things slipping massively out of control for everyone, but particularly James' Tony Gates, a good cop making some very bad decisions. Line Of Duty was also notable for being just one of the places Gina McKee popped up this year (see also: Secret State, Hebburn), and for the inclusion of a 13-year old character seemingly written to justify every Daily Mail complaint about feral youth.

4. THE HOUR

Bit of a surprise, this one. The first series of The Hour looked great, boasted fine lead turns from the very good-looking triumvirate of Romola Garai, Dominic West and Ben Whishaw, sterling support from the likes of Anna Chancellor, Burn Gorman and Julian Rhind-Tutt and a snappy theme tune... but it still didn't convince. Initially hampered by everyone claiming it was going to be a British Mad Men (spoiler: it wasn't), it turned on a slightly soggy espionage plot which neither convinced nor gripped. Series 2 shifted its attentions to a vice ring and immediately did both. All of the above returned (save Gorman), and were joined by an excellent, scene-stealing Peter Capaldi as well as, bizarrely, people from The Inbetweeners (Hannah Tointon) and Skins (Joe Cole, looking set to corner the market in blank-eyed, baby-faced thugs). With a beefed-up role for Oona Chaplin as West's wife and a greater sense of personal involvement for all concerned, The Hour upped its game to become must-watch telly, its final episode a genuinely tense conclusion to the year's most-improved show.

5. SECRET STATE

The link between all the shows on this list is conspiracy, whether political or corporate, in the police or by master criminals, or in the two Nordic examples at the top of the list, a combination of all of the above. So let's end with some knockabout slapstick comedy... or just continue to plough into the darkness with Secret State, which opened with Deputy PM Gabriel Byrne surveying the destruction wreaked upon a Northern town by an industrial accident and only got more oppressive from there. Byrne aside, top turns came from Gina McKee (again), Charles Dance, Rupert Graves and Ruth Negga. One of Byrne's few allies was a drunken conspiracy theorist, but one of the messages you could glean from the narrative was that, actually, those conspiracies are probably true, everyone's out for themselves and a knotty collusion of big business, the banks, military top brass and venal politicians would do whatever it takes to keep their wheels greased and the government in their pocket. Happy New Year!

Oh, and one of Byrne's other allies was his security guard, who was played by Finchy out of The Office. Sadly, at no point in proceedings did he challenge anyone to a shoe-throwing competition over 10 Downing Street.

NOT QUITE: DOCTOR WHO

The first half of Series 7 ultimately proved too hit or miss to merit a Top 5 placing. OK, there were no total stinkers (Dinosaurs On A Spaceship came closest), but the decision to make stand-alone episodes rather than the more typically Moffat story arc didn't pay off. Dinosaurs and A Town Called Mercy didn't expand beyond their remits (Dinosaurs On A Spaceship and Dr Who Goes Western, respectively), despite decent turns from David Bradley as Solomon and Adrian Scarborough as Kahler-Jex. Of the remaining three episodes, The Power Of Three was a clever take on alien invasion, but the opening and closing stories were the clear standouts. Series opener Asylum Of The Daleks afforded us a teasing glimpse of future companion Jenna-Louise Coleman; as if preparing the waters, Moffat gave her all the best lines, with the teasing relationship between her and the Doctor leaving the Ponds in the background. Much of the series seemed to emphasize the Ponds' "normal" life, with the introduction of Mark Williams as Rory's Dad (a good thing, except when riding a triceratops) and their considering the possibility of quitting as the Doctor's companions. By the end of The Angels Take Manhattan - a great period piece, with a noir feel and a bunch of twists - it's clear that this emphasis was there to render their departure as poignant as possible. Yes, as far as I can figure out there are definite loopholes in the conclusion (which I can't discuss without massive spoilers), but after a series where even Moffat occasionally seemed to tire of his beloved Ponds, this was a suitable send-off. And, after what might be the best ever Christmas special  - and the first since The Christmas Invasion introduced David Tennant to feel like a significant part of the ongoing story rather than a guest-starry stand-alone - the second half of Series 7, unravelling the mystery of Jenna-louise Coleman's character(s), looks set to be a massive improvement.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS:
Yeah, I watched, and thoroughly enjoyed THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE-OFF: got a problem with that?  HEBBURN was a sweet-natured sitcom, occasionally predictable but with a rare charm. Only saw one episode of A TOUCH OF CLOTH, but it was a genius, Airplane/Police Squad demolition of modern cop shows. 24 HOURS IN A&E continued to make most other reality TV shows look even more inconsequential than ever, the stories it told making NHS cuts even more unforgivable. To someone like myself who hadn't read the novel, PARADE'S END was faintly incomprehensible throughout, but gave us lots of posh actors acting their ruddy socks off. BIRDSONG was more comprehensible, similarly posh, and pretty great. THE SECRET OF CRICKLEY HALL was a dumb but fun ghost story, almost let down by a couple of really shit bits in the last episode; Suranne Jones was ace, though. Was THE LAST WEEKEND too unpleasant (and too full of unsympathetic characters) to be enjoyable, or was it just unpleasant enough? Still not sure. REVENGE was kinda fun, like a re-booted Dynasty with murderous intent, or 90210 gone evil. Only got half way through it, though. Like some sort of idiot, I totally missed The Thick Of It and Getting On.

AND FINALLY, THE WORST, BUT MOST STRANGELY ADDICTIVE SHOW OF 2012:
ONCE UPON A TIME

Really, what were they thinking? It's impossible even to type the premise of this show without involuntarily raising an eyebrow, but here goes...

All fairy tales are real, and all the characters live in a parallel universe to this one. The evil Queen out of Snow White gets a right cob on about Snow White and Prince Charming looking set to be happy ever after, so she conjures a curse upon the whole kingdom, which results in everyone getting transported to our world - specifically, a made-up town in Maine (called Storybrooke - geddit?). "Snow" and "Charming" get it particularly bad, as their Earthly incarnations are a mimsy school teacher and a dithering idiot (I think we're supposed to be on their side, but I prefer the Queen to these wet losers). Everyone's lost their memory except the Queen, who's now called Regina (geddit??) and is the Mayor of Storybrooke, and Rumplestiltskin, played by Robert Carlyle, who gets to camp the fuck out in his Magic Land incarnation, all scaly skin and saying things like "Everything has a price, dearie" all the time. In Maine, he's an antique dealer/landlord called Mr Gold (geddit???).

Now, Regina has adopted this kid, who is really fucking irritating. He's got a storybook (with some unsuitably adult content, frankly) and has somehow come to the conclusion that the people around him are the displaced characters from Fairy Town. He also reckons that his real mum is the daughter of "Snow" and "Charming", making her the Chosen One, whose arrival in Storybrooke at the age of 28 (oh yeah, time has stood still in Storybrooke for 28 years, nobody except this precocious kid has aged and NOBODY'S FUCKING NOTICED) will break the curse. So he goes to find his mum Emma, who's out living in a proper city, convinces her to take him back to Storybrooke, and so it goes.

I think I read that some people who worked on Lost are behind Once Upon A Time, and if so, they've half-inched the episode structure where events in the present day share viewing time with pertinent flashbacks. So as events in Storybrooke unfold (painfully slowly), we get filled in on the fairy tale backstory. Back in Fantasy Kingdom, everyone dresses like they're in a bad 80s pop video, and the "magical" special effects and make up are like a bad 90s TV series.

So, I watched every episode of this, and I'm still not sure why. Emma, played by Jennifer Morrison (House), is quite a kick-arse heroine - in fact, with Regina, the flashback version of Snow and even, yes, Red Riding Hood, this is a show which prioritizes strong female characters. While not on the ridiculous level of Lost, there's also a tendency to leave mysteries hanging in a rather enticing way, so that you put up with some lame episodes to get to the truth of what's going on. And, occasionally, there's a flash of the darkness that lies behind all fairy tales. There's a second series due. I'll probably watch it.

1996-1999, Part 3: How To Operate With A Blown Mind

So, last time was mainly concerned with bigger gigs, festivals, and so forth. That's all well and good, but don't go thinking that '97 was the year I sold out or anything. There were still plenty of lower-key gigs on my radar - like Smog UK and W.O.R.M. at the Joiners in March, for example. I've written plenty about Smog already, though, and all I can really remember about W.O.R.M. is that one of them hustled us into buying their demo after they'd played. It wasn't great. W.O.R.M. are, apparently, still together.

More punk rock, and indeed more Smog UK, was to be had in June, when the STE held their second 2 Day Festival (at the Joiners, natch). I only made it to the Saturday, and missed the first few bands cos I was at work selling copies of OK Computer. This meant I missed openers Minute Manifesto - about whom you'll be hearing plenty more - and The Short & Curlies, who Jimmy (a new friend from work, about whom you'll be hearing even more than Minute Manifesto) informed me were hilarious. One of the bands I did catch was Grover, a melodic power trio from Manchester (not to be confused with the post-rock Grover, or a character from Sesame Street). They were followed by Ebola (not to be confused with the breakcore Ebola on Wrong Music - jeez, this band name lark's confusing, isn't it?). This Ebola ruddy well smashed it at the festival. With savage male/female dual vocals and a sound which blurred the lines between hardcore and power violence, they were one of the most intense bands I'd seen at this point. It was during their set that the venue's lights cut out, and they remained out of action for the headliners, Shutdown (not to be confused with the New York band of the same name. Obviously). In Ian Glasper's highly recommended tome Armed With Anger, the band claim that their last gig was at the LA2 with No Fun At All, Millencolin and Samiam, but I'm sure that at the time, this darkened performance was supposedly the last hurrah for the underrated post-hardcore crew.

Smog UK themselves split soon after the festival, but it seemed that a bunch of new bands were coming out of the woodwork in the local punk scene. Two of them, Good Grief and the afore-mentioned Minute Manifesto, played a free show at the Joiners in August. At this point, I knew the former bunch better as individuals, given that they included long-time scenesters Cov John (grin and bass), Rooster (spiky hair, football shirt and guitar) and Theresa (vocals). I don't remember a thing about their drummer, though ironically I met him years later in Brighton, where he's become a good friend. Good Grief played melodic punk, informed both by Cov John's beloved US pop punk and a more Blondie-ish feel (probably due to Theresa's vox). They were good, though it felt very much like watching some locals from the boozer having a bash at being a band.

And then there was Minute Manifesto.

At one point, I was tempted to devote an entire chapter to this lot. Then Armed With Anger came out, with - you guessed it - an entire chapter on them. Cheers, then. Only joking - they fully deserved it, and I've got enough personal observations to impart without simply paraphrasing Mr Glasper.

From the off, there was something different about Minute Manifesto. They didn't look like some locals from the boozer having a bash at being a band, but not because they looked like Rock Stars or anything - quite the opposite, in fact. They essentially looked like a bunch of freaks, geeks and chimps, even more so when Lobster from Ebola joined in '98. Of the original line-up, frontman Jamie Festo originally rocked a massive mohawk, guitarist Dingo/Romsey Matt was a shy fellow (we nicknamed him Nervous Matt due to his charmingly awkward demeanour), bassist Rob Callen was a skinny chap topped off with an unruly mop of curly hair and drummer Mat Sweet was a quiet, presentable gentleman. As Jamie points out in AWA, "There was no way you could have guessed we were a thrash band by looking at us."

And while they were indeed a thrash band, in the hardcore rather than metal sense (think Larm, Infest, Dropdead, Ripcord, Heresy, etc), their unlikely image was allied to a similarly unusual sound. I'd sometimes use Napalm Death as an easy comparison when attempting to describe them to people who ahdn't heard of the above bands, and they did have a few tunes which lasted mere seconds, like Skateboarding Is Not A Crime. But while they might have conformed to the short, fast and loud aesthetic of thrashcore, the disparate influences of the band's members fed into their music to make it far more interesting than most of their peers (Ebola aside).  They were undoubtedly one of the most important bands in my life who some of who will never had heard of. Jamie's vocals were heartfelt and terrifying, the music was ramshackle but powerful, and every time I saw them play they were, in every sense, an absolute blast. Later in '97, they played a DJ Hammy night at the Joiners and confused the indie-loving students with their brief shards of politicised noise, which only made me love them (and DJ Hammy) more. All of the members of the band would become our friends, and all of their vinyl releases - split 7"s with Grover and Shank and a split LP with Urko - were utterly essential (they're also crying out to be released as a discography CD, but they're not the sort of people to look back). There are more stories to be told about Minute Manifesto, but you'll hear about gigs with the likes of His Hero Is Gone, Dropdead and Sarah in due course. Meanwhile, here's some fairly poor footage which does little to capture how great they were in full flight.

The Joiners wasn't only hosting crucial underground punk rock shows, of course. Me and Wayne headed down there in late September to go and see A and Groop Dogdrill. By all accounts, there wasn't much love lost between these touring "buddies". Maybe I was just missing a context of friendly ribbing, but when Jason Perry from A was quoted in the press saying that Groop Dogdrill's musical output was on a par with (forgotten psychobilly band) King Kurt b-sides, and Groop Dogdrill responded by claiming that the singer had such rock star pretensions that he owned a guitar-shaped swimming pool, it certainly seemed that there was a genuine animosity between the two camps.

If I was to come down on one side of the schism, which hardly ranked alongside the Blur/Oasis hostilities in terms of era-defining pop star barneys, it would have been the side which sounded like King Kurt b-sides. Groop Dogdrill were a Doncaster trio with a rock'n'roll swagger somewhere between Therapy?'s catchiness and Jon Spencer's gnarliness. They possessed a fascination with Americana in its trucker-capped, hot rod-obsessed, sleaze-bedecked sense, and knocked out two great albums in their lifetime. Contemporary production values mean that their recorded work sounds slightly tamer than I remember their gigs being, but many of their tunes became favourites for me and certain other members of what I will never refer to as "my crew". I also ended up on nodding terms with bassist Damo, thanks to him popping in to my place of work on the day of a Joiners show (in '99 or thereabouts) to purchase the deluxe edition of the first Slipknot album "for his girlfriend". He subsequently recognised me at the evening's hoedown and the rest is, well, the occasional friendly nod.

A - sometimes also known as 'A', so as not to be confused with the beginning of a sentence - were a poppier beast. This five-piece from Suffolk were responsible for a sound not unlike The Police, if Sting and his Geordie pals had been the sort of men who dressed like teenage American skateboarders well into their thrities. I quite liked them at the time, with their brash choruses and primary colour songcraft. Their ebullience can probably be deduced from the fact that their debut album, which dropped a short while after their show at the Joiners, was called How Ace Are Buildings. If that doesn't make a band the anti-Einsturzende Neubaten, I don't know what does. In retrospect, A ('A'?) were merely OK, but they served their purpose, which was to encourage a roomful of sweaty teens and twenty-somethings to jump up and down to songs called things like Bad Idea (a list song in which wake up calls are deemed to be on a par with the KKK in the canon of shitty things).

Groop Dogdrill we'll encounter again. A ('A'?) we will too, owing to a curious double booking of the Joiners, but we won't be dwelling on that. The latter managed a string of albums and even hit the UK Top 10 in 2002 with Nothing, the video for which reveals them still dressing like teenage American skateboarders, with the exception of reliably rocking bassist Daniel P Carter (who'd joined the band after I saw them). After their split, Carter managed to maintain the highest profile, thanks to his stewardship of Radio 1's Rock Show. Sadly, unlike his erstwhile predecessor Tommy Vance, he is yet to describe a band's sound as "crucifying your eardrums", or to preside over a weekly Battle Of The Bands contest called THE ROCK WAR, which was basically The X-Factor on the radio for people called Gareth and Jeff who liked Thunder and Whitesnake.

Oh sorry, where we?

Oh yes, one of the three Perry brothers out of A ('A'?) went on to be a songwriter/producer for both hotshot UK rock bands like The Blackout and hotshot UK pop bands like McFly. I like to imagine that he is conducting a satirical exercise designed to highlight the lack of difference between these two types of band, but in truth he's clearly just paying the bills. Guitar-shaped swimming pools need constant attention, I've always found.

We're at a juncture where I need to step away from the music to fill you in on developments in my private life. Firstly, Steph, Simon, Wayne and I had made a bunch of new friends. Through Rupert, who I'd known since my first term at uni, we met Paul, then his sister Lyn and her friend Michelle, then Michelle's ex (I think?) Mark, his sister Caroline and their friend Ben. Then there were Jo, Mim, Dan, Jess, Steve, Theresa and a bunch more. This lot, plus our workmates and a bunch more people (Owen, various girlfriends of Simon, etc) became the extended group who would regularly attend local rock club the Nexus on Fridays and Saturdays, often ending up back at our house. If I tell you that our house was a sort of party central from summer '97 up until Halloween '99 (the last decent party I can remember there, despite the fact I lived there until 2003), then you will think I'm bigging myself up or over-playing some sort of fabled golden age of debauchery. But ask anyone we were knocking about with at the time, and they'll tell you. Our proper, organised parties were generally mayhem, while sometimes we'd get back from the Nexus on a Saturday night and find friends waiting outside to be let in for a post-club session. (N.B. Steph, Simon, Wayne - if I am exaggerating, feel free to say so).


We'd got to know Ben, Caroline, Mark and the rest of their bunch of mates pretty well. On top of the nights at the Nexus and the house parties, we were going to drum'n'bass nights with them, seeing the likes of Mampi Swift, DJ Red and the Ganja Kru (still the most bass-intense musical experience I've had). I'd later go and see Kemistry & Storm play in '99, a show which would sadly turn out to be their last; Kemistry was killed in a horrible random accident on the way home from Southampton. RIP.

Drum'n'bass wasn't the only form of dance music on our radar in '97. This was the era of the prosaically named Big Beat genre, shortly to explode onto the public consciousness through the success of Fatboy Slim. It was appropriate that he was the one who took the genre to Number One, given that it had effectively grown out of his DJing at parties in Brighton (though you could also argue that The Prodigy and Chemical Brothers, while not exactly Big Beat themselves, had paved the way somewhat). With samples drawn from soul, ska, funk, hip hop and rock enslaved to relentlessly bouncy beats, this was the first dance genre which seemed to be aimed predominantly at pissed-up students. As a group of pissed-up ex-students, students and future students, we fucking lapped it up.

Now, I didn't visit my current home of Brighton until the 21st Century, but in '97 it came to us in the form of Lo-Fidelity Allstars. This bunch of scruffy buggers were labelmates of Fatboy Slim, but unlike the majority of the Skint roster, they were actually a proper band, and so they did a proper tour, which took them to the Joiners. A large chunk of the people cited above were there, as were Jimmy and a bunch of his Winchester mates. The Pecadiloes supported, playing a sort of glowering electro-rock which went down well with me and Steph. The Lo-Fis (inevitable abbreviation alert!) were great, their decks'n' FX augmented by a live rhythm section and the cracked vocals and aggrieved stance of frontman The Wrekked Train, who brought a faintly Mark E Smith-esque glower to proceedings. Incidentally, they all had silly pseudonyms: musical director Phil Ward called himself The Albino Priest. Their album wouldn't be out until the next year, but the single Disco Machine Gun, with its (subsequently removed) sample of The Breeders' Cannonball, had already won us over, and the show was excellent. Great things seemed on the horizon, but while they started '98 on the cover of Melody Maker and enjoyed a Top 20 placing for their How To Operate With A Blown Mind album, The Wrekked Train shortly left to glower elsewhere and the band took four years to release another album, by which point nobody really gave a fuck anymore. When I moved to Brighton in 2003, I'd still sometimes see The Albino Priest wandering about. He always seemed to have a bag of records with him.

1996-1999, Part 2: mud, sweat and tears

Those of you who've been reading this blog over the months will no doubt have formed the opinion that I'm very much my own man when it comes to gig-going. "That guy," you'll have said to yourselves, "If he wants to go and see Jacob's Mouse play at the Joiners Arms, he just bloody well does, doesn't he?" And indeed, I did.

But through '97 and '98 I started going to shows because other people wanted to go, namely Steph and my workmates. It's just good form to accompany your other half to entertainments of their choosing, while a shared passion for music meant that gigs helped me bond with my new colleagues.

One of the hot new bands of the old radar back then was Placebo. They combined qualities from US alternative bands with a decadent, very European feel, and their ostentatiously androgynous image and lyrics were splendidly primed and timed to wind up the Loaded lads. Steph, Simon and I were all into their first album; I'd heard their first few singles while still at Uni, and the full-length came out in summer '96, the season which saw me and Steph get together and Simon move back from Canada. Where our tastes didn't always converge - I had to beg our friend Rupert to take back the copy of Jagged Little Pill he'd lent us when the other two played it to death - this was definitely an album we could all agree on.

Obviously, Molko's vocals could put people off - his high-pitched Transatlantic accent would never be to everyone's taste. What people often overlook is the quality of his guitar playing, which took influences from the underground (particularly Sonic Youth) and twisted them into mainstream-friendly shapes. They went off the boil pretty much straight after that debut - the deviant nursery rhyme of Pure Morning, the first tune off the next album, proved rather trying - but I was happy to go and see them at Southampton Guildhall. In comparison, I was rather less convinced by the idea of going to see Bush there.

When their debut album, Sixteen Stone, came out, I quickly wrote Bush off as a bunch of Nirvana copyists who'd almost entirely missed the point of Nirvana. Sure, we all know how the latter story ended, but for me their humour, goofiness and ear for pop were all as important to their identity as the angst and depression. Not so with Bush, essentially the UK outpost of the dreary post-grunge movement which included similarly uninspiring American counterparts like Live and Creed.

Bush were playing Southampton in support of their second album, Razorblade Suitcase. If Razorblade Suitcase had been the name of a band on Too Pure or Clawfist getting played by John Peel in 1993, I would have thought that was a pretty cool name. As a title for a second album by grunge arrivistes Bush, it was obviously terrible. However, I was intrigued by the fact that Steve Albini had produced - sorry, "recorded" - it. As well as playing in Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac, Albini had recorded some of my favourite albums, like PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me, Pod by The Breeders, Sea Monsters by The Wedding Present, pretty much everything by The Jesus Lizard - oh, and Nirvana's In Utero. Obviously, his involvement was just another job, not his personal endorsement, but his techniques still made this a more interesting sounding record, and I grudgingly enjoyed their show at The Guildhall.

Let's move on to my workmates. I swiftly realised that they were a bunch of misfits, outsiders, cynics and eccentrics. In other words: my kind of people. After 16 years, working in five different stores in four different towns alongside several hundred colleagues, I'm gratified to say that this has generally remained the case.

With no retail experience, I was cast into the stockroom, where I would spend the months leading up to Christmas 1996 stickering up multiple copies of Spice by The Spice Girls, Blue Is The Colour by The Beautiful South and A Different Beat by Boyzone. My immediate boss was Wayne, whose attitude towards his own position can be summed up by his reaction when I introduced him to Steph as my boss. "I'm not his boss!" he quickly cried. Nevertheless, I'm sure his support helped me get kept on after Christmas, and he became a good friend. In March '97, he drove me, Steph and Simon over to Portsmouth to go and see 3 Colours Red.

This bunch of rockers - or Britrockers, as we were expected to call them in those days - were frequently described as a baby Wildhearts, due both to similarities in their sound and the presence of co-frontman Chris McCormack, brother of the knee-dislocating, disaster-prone 'hearts bassist. Less accurately, label boss Alan McGee, no stranger to hyperbole, described them as the best rock band since the Sex Pistols, or something similar.

Obviously, they weren't, but they made for a pretty decent night out. In support were Hurricane #1, a new band who I was excited to learn featured Andy Bell out of shoegazer faves Ride. Caught up in the moment of discovering an exciting new band, none of us noticed that they only had one good song (Step Into My World), and when they played a headline show at The Joiners not too long afterwards we made sure we were there.

It's funny, now that Eels are viewed as a cult-ish solo artist beloved of Mojo and Uncut readers, to think that there was a time when they were a HOT! NEW! BAND! Back in spring '97, they seemed to occupy a space somewhere between the playful invention of Beck and the mordant gallows humour of the depressed, with two Top 10 singles under their belts courtesy of Novocaine For The Soul and Susan's House. Steph, myself, possibly Simon and a bunch of people from work (definitely Wayne, and I think Beaka, Kirsty, Paula...maybe Phil?) made a pilgrimage to the Astoria to see them, the first time I'd gone to London for a show in several years. It wasn't the first time Eels had played in London, but it still felt like we were getting in at the start of something. The trip up to the smoke had been largely at Wayne and Paula's insistence - they both had a good radar for HOT! NEW! BANDS! - but everyone dug the show and the album Beautiful Freak became a workplace favourite. They've made harder, weirder, more mature and more Tom Waitsy albums since, but none have quite had the pop charm of that first record.

The workplace also allowed me access to a few shows I wouldn't have otherwise attended. Unfortunately, this included going to see Space. My colleague Darren had got himself on the guestlist for their gig at the Guildhall, and couldn't go, so suggested I "become" Darren for the evening. I'm not sure why I went - I'd never been a fan of their novelty indie pop and had even slagged them off during a short-lived stint DJing on a radio station based on Southampton's Marlands shopping centre (god, that's a whole other story). They'd also been in the shop doing a signing that day and had seemed like a humourless bunch. But I think Simon quite liked them, and I could get him in as a +1, so we went. And it was awful, the lowest of many low points coming when singer Tommy Scott stood on a podium (he was quite short) to duet with a giant video of my old chum Cerys Matthews on The Ballad Of Tom Jones. Sometimes, when people ask me about the worst gig I've ever been to, Space come to mind.

We used to have regular quizzes in staff meetings, and being something a smart-arse (and this being back in the day when music was still the primary concern of the shop) I would sometimes win. As this was also the time when promotional goodies and freebies flowed like rainwater in a British summer, I found myself on the receiving end of a few decent prizes. I remember being awarded a promo of Daft Punk's Homework album, which Steph and Simon did not get on with at all. They used to compare Da Funk to a car alarm, the non-electronic music fan heathens. Thinking about it, I should have played it as much as they'd played Jagged Little Pill the summer before.

I also scored a couple of tickets, the first being a trip to see The Orb at Portsmouth Pyramids. I hadn't seen them since what was  - for me, at least - a mind-expanding turn at Glastonbury '93, and my old school mate Simon was currently living at his folks' place in Cosham (a suburb of Pompey, I guess), so it sounded like a great idea for a night out.

However, I hadn't counted on the Super Strength Strongbow.

Simon had very generously procured a four-pack of said beverage - but he was driving. It was, therefore, my duty to neck three of these before we went to the Pyramids. I think you can probably see where we're heading. We arrived at the venue while the warm-up DJ was playing. I latterly discovered that this might have been Witchman, but, frankly, I have no fucking clue. Before The Orb even took to the stage, I was so hammered that I was begging Simon to take me home. To his eternal credit, he drove me all the way back to Southampton, while I proceeded to vomit over myself in his car. On pulling up outside our place, I refused to believe that I was actually home - by this point I was angrily demanding to be taken back. Simon had to get the other Simon out of bed to convince me that I was in fact in the right place. Getting out of the car, I tripped over my seat belt and suffered a minor kerb/head interface. And so it was that when Steph returned from her own night out, expecting me to have stayed over in Portsmouth, she found me passed out in the bed covered in blood and vomit. The next day, I told everyone at work that the gig had been great, ashamed that I'd squandered my free tickets.

2012 update: I'm still friends with Simon. I don't go out with Steph any more. Super Strength Strongbow is no longer on the market.

Before we get to my next - rather more responsibly handled - work freebie, I should mention that Steph, Simon and I moved house in Spring '97. Factors in this decision included our lack of a garden and the concern that our landlord might not have been particularly great, this latter point emphasised by the fact that for months we'd had to avoid certain parts of the kitchen floor (right outside Simon's room) because there were no floorboards and we would have found ourselves in the downstairs flat. So we legged it to a house which we would share with Wayne and our friend Steve, who went out with Steph's workmate Louise. (These last two might be the only couple I know from those days who've actually lasted the distance, no doubt helped by the fact that they're both bloody lovely). There are a couple of photos somewhere of this original line-up of the house, with us all sat on the floor larking about like we're doing a promo shoot for some down-at-heel UK remake of Friends, or perhaps a version of This Life where none of the characters had either money or any understanding of the concept of career aspirations. We'd moved into Northam, known locally as one of the town's dodgiest areas, but I personally never got any hassle on our street. OK, Steve's car got broken into on the first night, but he had left a bunch of valuables on the back seat. And a gormless fellow continually knocked on the door to ask whether the house's previous occupant was in, never remembering that we'd already told him umpteen times that he'd moved out. I guess he was still getting his drugs from somewhere. And there was Hell's Angels graffiti opposite our house, but that was on the other side of the railway line. But essentially, this area really wasn't as dodgy as it was made out to be, and I'd carry on living in the house, with an ever-changing roll call of housemates, until I moved out of Southampton six years later.

My uni mate Gail helped us out by giving us a lift to pick up a couple of kittens (another reason we'd wanted to move), and to say thanks I invited her along to my next quiz-won freebie: Tribal Gathering '97. Well, I wasn't going to take Daft Punk haters Steph and Simon, and Wayne and Steve were definitely both rockers not ravers.

Now, at yer rock festivals, I'd generally work out some sort of itinerary to get round and see all the bands I was into - even if that never ended up happening. But at Tribal, I was more into the idea of taking in the general vibe by wandering around the different, New Age-ily named tents and seeing where the day took me (Gail had her own preferences, so we ended up splitting up for most of the festival). Consequently, I eschewed lots of big names - including Kraftwerk, Orbital and that there Daft Punk - in favour of frugging to whoever was on in tents called things like "Equator" (drum'n'bass) and "Muzik's Tropic" (happy hardcore, and the friendliest vibe of the whole place, thanks largely to everyone looking like Sharkey on the cover of a Bonkers compilation).

I wandered into the Trans Europe tent to see what was going on. What was going on was the Two Lone Swordsmen Soundsystem playing what sounded like whalesong to nobody at all. One of the few proper appointments I kept was to see John Peel in the Pacific tent. First, I caught the end of Cornershop's set, which I think was a reading of 6AM Jullander Shere. At this point, with Brimful Of Asha yet to be released, yet alone remixed by Fatboy Slim, their billing was pretty brave and certainly forward-thinking, though at the year's end Brimful... topped Peely's Festive 50. Peel played some typically unsuitable rekkids (I'm pretty sure I heard Status Quo and, of course, The Fall, though I could be wrong) which people generally couldn't dance to and everybody loved him anyway - I'd recommend checking out his Fabric mix CD for a taste of the sort of things he'd play when invited to these events. The other act I can remember was Roni Size launching his band Reprazent. Again, their Mercury-winning album New Forms was yet to be released, but there was clearly something pretty special going on. I was, and remain, sceptical that drum'n'bass needs live vocals, "proper" instruments and a jazz influence, but taken on their own merits - as a band rather than as, er, representatives of a genre - they were an exciting proposition. I'm still not sure what "Step to the rhythm made out of brown paper" means, though.

I can't help thinking that 1997 was a more innocent time for dance festivals. These days there'd be a stage dedicated to the "EDM" of Swedish House Mafia and the 2K12 Unlimited sounds of Guetta and his idiot herd, and another full of the bubblegrime and popstep which has taken the UK Urban scene into the charts at the expense of its soul. And somewhere on the site, instead of John Peel, Zane ruddy Lowe would be playing.

Tribal Gathering wouldn't be my only festival of that summer, of course. That's right, there was also Power In The Park, which sounds like some sort of far right rally, but was in fact the local radio station's free show on Southampton Common. The South's Number One Hit Music Station, Power FM, was responsible for dragging various chart stars of the day down for a summer day's frolic amongst Southampton's pop kids... and a bunch of my mates, lured mainly by the free entry and the fact it was a nice day to drink in the sun. I remember Sash! appeared and played Encore Un Fois, before an over-eager local deejay whipped the crowd up into a frenzy to demand Sash! come back and give us another. Unfortunately, nobody had prepared Sash! for this eventuality, and consequently Germany's Number One Hit Music Producer had only brought one DAT tape. He was therefore forced to play Encore Un Fois encore un fois.

Ocean Colour Scene headlined and we pretended that they were somehow better than the other acts because they were actually playing live and they wrote their own songs and blah blah blah. They were, in reality, just as shit as the rest of the day's entertainment, with the added horror of having at least one song which made the image of Chris Evans doing something wacky appear, unbidden, in your mind's eye

Oh yeah, there was another festival we went to that year, wasn't there? Must have been trying to shut it out as a traumatic memory or something. Because, believe me, Glastonbury '97 was more traumatic than coming home to find your boyfriend passed out in the bed covered in blood and vomit.

Yeah, I know, it was a bit muddy, get over it. But in what is now terrifyingly close to two decades of going to festivals, I've never been to one which was so fucked over by the weather as this one. In '95, I'd left Glastonbury with sunburn. This time, it was more likely to be trenchfoot. The second stage was sinking on the Friday, so a bunch of bands (including Kenickie, more's the pity) had to cancel. Me and Steph (for it was just us two) spent most of the day wandering through mud feeling sorry for ourselves, eventually bumping into Matt from Smog UK and his girlfriend (whose name has unfortunately disappeared into the mud of my memory) and hanging out with them for a while. It was in their company that we spied, from the top of what might have been the ricketiest Big Wheel in the south of England, that the second stage had finally opened, with Placebo doing their thing onstage. We rushed over, but had basically missed them, darkening our mood further. I think we managed to see Beck and maybe Smashing Pumpkins on the main stage, but Friday was basically a write-off.

On Saturday, the rain had at least eased off, and we were up early (in festival terms) to see The Wannadies open up the main stage. Later in the day, I remember watching Stereolab on the second stage, having to constantly lift my legs up and down to prevent my wellies getting stuck in the mud. It might have been this day when we went to see Christy Moore, an old favourite of Steph's Dad, in the acoustic tent. But essentially, Saturday was all about Radiohead.

Radiohead at Glastonbury in 1997 is arguably the only gig I've been to which regularly crops up in "Top 100 Gigs Ever!" lists. Type "Glastonbury 1997" into a search engine or YouTube and the Oxford band's name will appear. Even then, it was almost a cliche - when I returned to work on the following Tuesday and said that Radiohead were the best band I'd seen over the weekend, Assistant Manager James "Lord" Rumley did one of those stifling-a-fake-yawn mimes. But, the thing is, it was a genuinely great set from a band at their absolute peak. Whatever you think about the albums they went on to release - and I'm certainly a fan of Kid A - the summer they released OK Computer was the very best time to see Radiohead. There were a bunch of spine-tingling moments - a rare performance of Creep (semi-disowned by the band at that point), awkward tunes like Paranoid Android ("Can you turn on the lights so we can see the people?") and Climbing Up The Walls going down a storm, fireworks for No Surprises, the set closing with Street Spirit. Is it an exaggeration to claim that they almost single-handedly rescued the festival from a collective mud-damaged bad mood? Probably, but they certainly perked us up.

I think it was this night when we then went to go catch a late set from Massive Attack on the Jazz World stage, only to find it was running over an hour late. Oh well.

Most of Sunday was spent on the second stage, where we'd have seen Super Furry Animals, Pavement and Live (not my choice!) before Mansun tried, and failed, to play a set due to some sort of problem with the sound. As mimsy a band as The Bluetones are, they at least managed to end the festival with a feelgood set.

And that was that... except, when we returned to the quagmire-free streets of Southampton, I decided to fire off a missive to Melody Maker about our experiences. The main impetus was the way Michael Eavis kept banging on about "the Blitz spirit" in relation to the kids who managed to stay the course of the weekend. I found this pretty patronising, and felt like there had been some pretty serious issues with the festival. Obviously, nobody can control or second guess the weather, but it didn't feel like sufficient provision had been made for the event of heavy rainfall. There were other issues too - an undercurrent of violence was steering the festival's lawlessness in an unpleasant direction, with stories circulating that gangs armed with baseball bats were patrolling the perimeter extorting money from the folks attempting to jump the fence. I was positive about Radiohead and some of the other bands, but the general tone of the letter can be gleaned from the fact that I used the word "fiasco" twice.

To my surprise, the letter wasn't just printed, but was awarded Letter Of The Week. This prompted a reply from Michael Eavis, where he defended his running of the festival and closed with a comment along the lines of, "Give us another try next year, Olly. If you can get a ticket, that is." The following week, somebody wrote in sticking up for me and accusing Eavis (again) of being patronising.

I didn't go back to Glastonbury the following year, but I did the year after that. My attitude towards Eavis has softened - I'm sure he did the best he could that weekend in 1997, and while I haven't been to the fields of Worthy Farm this century, I'm glad the festival's still there.

Well, I think that's more than enough for now. Next time we'll be back seeing scuzzy indie bands and DIY punks in the Joiners and making a few new friends...

1996-1999, Part 1: Adulthood

Up until the early summer of 1996, my life had been mapped out in a perpetual routine of terms and holidays. The places I spent those terms might have changed every few years, but otherwise this system had felt as constant as the changing of the seasons as far back as my memory could stretch. The prospect of finishing university had, therefore, been an unnerving one. 

By the stage of my life at which I'm currently writing, I have set replies to certain questions, pat comments on particular subjects. Their repetition does not, however, mean that they aren't true. So: the thing about doing an English Literature degree is that it really doesn't prepare you for any actual jobs out in the real world.

While many of my friends had done degrees which led directly to careers, or at least had plans for travelling or similarly moving on, I finished university with no clue as to what I should do next. My housemates were all returning to their hometowns, and there was a real chance that I'd have to do the same - back to living in a village without the ability to drive, where my most recent holiday job had been placing three dried strawberries in pots of supermarket trifle, for eight hours. Welcome to adulthood.

Happily, I escaped this certain fate thanks to a girl I'd started seeing a few months before the end of university. Her name was Steph, and in a very real sense I owe everything that's happened since then to her.

That summer, Steph, her brother Simon and I went to Reading. Looking at the line-up for that year, I have to admit that I probably missed a lot of the good stuff in favour of the average. On the first day, for example, we'd have seen Weezer, Offspring and Rage Against The Machine, but not Rocket From The Crypt, Sebadoh or Screaming Trees. Weezer are a band I've never been massively into, which has often left me feeling like some sort of social outcast; despite never owning their debut album, I know it inside out from its constant playing at house parties since the day it came out. The impression left on me by Offspring can probably be summed up by the fact that, before researching this, I'd totally forgotten that I'd ever seen them. Rage would have impressed me more a couple of years earlier, or indeed five years later, but at this point I was pretty bored by them, and I think we just watched them from the far end of the field. The heady days of 1993, when Simon Hildesley bought their debut album (on tape, natch) in London and I had to start speaking REALLY LOUDLY to his mum in the car on the way back whenever Zack De La Rocha started swearing, were long gone. I still liked political punk and hip hop, I still liked American alternative rock (though more along the lines of Pavement by this point), and I still liked metal, but somehow Rage's shtick seemed out of place by 1996, too ham-fisted. Anyway, the Democrats were in power over there, the Tories were on the way out over here, we weren't involved in any major wars, everyone knew racism was a bad thing, life was good... Like I say, they started making more sense a few years later...

I took Steph and Si to see 12 Rounds on the third stage, because I'd really dug their trip hop/rock-styled album, but they (the band) seemed nervous and all over the place, and I made a point of not dragging my companions to many other bands they'd never heard of before. I mean, I got the impression they weren't that keen on a Fuzzy Logic-era Super Furry Animals on the Saturday, but Simon was much more impressed with my old chum Cerys and her Catatonia (and did we see Salad as well? I think we did, you know). I seem to remember having a burger while Kula Shaker played. I think we opted for Dubstar over Black Grape for our Saturday night headliner. And people say festivals have bad line-ups these days! Sunday had a great main stage set from Compulsion, followed by Moby's unlikely rock make-over, and also Lionrock and Baby Bird on the second stage. The Stone Roses closed the festival with a set which has gone down in history as the absolute nadir of their career, with Ian Brown's voice so painfully out of tune that we turned away and sat in a place where Underworld's techno dulled the horror.

Not a classic festival experience, then, but it was still good to take Steph and Simon to their first UK festival (I think Steph, at least, had been to the Torhout-Werchter festival in Belgium). I think they enjoyed it...

I still had some business to finish off for The Edge, interviewing up-and-coming indie band Mansun when the played The Joiners in September. I had a bad head cold and hadn't done much research on them, beyond what I'd read in the press and the singles I'd heard - Egg Shaped Fred, Take It Easy Chicken and Stripper Vicar, the last of which had taken them into the Top 20 at the time of the show in question.

What I'd read in the press suggested that Mansun were a bunch of lads up for drunken shenanigans. They'd lost a couple of members since first coming to light, and seemed to spend photo shoots larking about. What I'd heard suggested that, while they displayed a nascent ambition musically, they were letting themselves down with some irritatingly zany lyrics - I mean, just look at those song titles again. Who did they think they were, Space?

At the very least, calling a single Stripper Vicar should indicate that a band don't take themselves too seriously. WRONG. Frontman Paul Draper and, to a lesser extent, guitarist Chad (bassist Stove, who looked like our mate Owen Millard, was absent) gave the impression that venues like The Joiners and student papers like The Edge - and, by extension, your correspondent - were very much beneath them. To be fair, as I've admitted above, I wasn't too well prepared, but they were culpable in the impressions I'd made of them beforehand, and certainly could have displayed a little more humour. They only really got animated when talking about their favourite bands, citing Duran Duran and Faith No More as touchstones. This was clearly intended to separate them from the sort of Britpop/Lad-rock outfits with whom I'd lumped them together; bizarrely, it also functions as a prediction of the sonic make-up of the band Lostprophets, at the time of this interview still labouring in Pontypridd hardcore bands called things like Public Disturbance.

I didn't bother hanging around for the gig, due to a combination of my cold and the poor impression Paul Draper and Chad had left on me. Their next single, Wide Open Space, turned out to be their biggest tune, helped in part, I always thought, by the fact that the then-new Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks seemed to play it a lot, perhaps due to Mansun hailing from the show's Chester location. On its way to becoming a late-90s festival anthem (and the Mansun track which will habitually turn up on compilations called things like 101 Indie Hits or Britpop Anthems), it helped take their debut album Attack Of The Grey Lantern to No.1 in early 1997. I saw them at that year's Glastonbury - well, sort of. We'll get to that fiasco in due course.

The next significant thing which happened to me in '96 was getting a job. I'd already put in some time trying to sell double glazing, for the most part unsuccessfully, and done one shift for October Books running a stall selling books to English students at the university's posh new arts campus (I spent part of my earnings on a great AC/DC tribute double single featuring Shellac, Big'N, Brise-Glace and US Maple).

One of the numbers I cold called for the double glazing company turned out to be a high street music retail chain (they passed on the offer of new windows). Ironically, I was at the store a few weeks later having applied for a Christmas temp vacancy. The manager took the piss out of me for wearing a suit to the interview, but took me on to work in the stockroom. I was glad to have a job which I actually wanted to do, and figured it would give me some breathing space to work out what I actually wanted to do with my life. I mean, it was only a Christmas job, it wasn't like I was gonna be there forever.

Yeah, right...

NEXT TIME: punk shows at the Joiners, including my first STE festival... un-punk shows with Steph and my new workmates, including Eels and 3 Colours Red... Tribal Gathering... and the hell on earth that was Glastonbury 1997...