Don’t they say in
24 Hour Party People “if it's a choice
between the truth and the legend, print the legend?”
The legend we told was that after having almost killed
myself twice, firstly in a car accident (truth) and then by electrocuting
myself while re-wiring a moog during a thunderstorm (fiction, it was a delay
box years later and it probably wasn't even raining) I decided to form a band in
order to leave something behind.
 |
| My room, including original white album poster and KEF speakers |
The truth was equally mundane. I moved to Reading because I
hated my job, my old band had fallen apart and I wanted to hang out with my
friends. I moved into a sprawling 6-bedroom student house with my best friend Mike
some of my other closest friends and an Irish girl called Nina. The first thing
I did was paint my bedroom bright orange. The room was lit by a vintage tanning lamp, under the light of which we recorded our first demo.
I moved to Reading with no job and a couple of hundred pounds in the bank. I had one plan, to form a half decent band to play some of the better songs I had accumulated while in my last band The Deviants. On my first Sunday in Reading, after going
to see
Austin Powers at the cinema, and while enjoying a drink in the
Purple Turtle,
I told my plan to Mike. He immediately wanted to be a part of it. We agreed, he
would be the drummer and I would play bass (simply because they were always the hardest
members to find and we wanted reliability). The plan was to have a female singer, and
we would wear black roll-neck jumpers, even in the summer. Within minutes he
was scouring the pub asking any attractive woman in a roll-neck jumpers to join the
band. We even agreed on the band name that night. Mike threw some words and. Saloon
just jumped out. In hindsight I, don’t know exactly why I loved it so much. I
liked the fact that it sounded countryish and that we could confound
expectations. But mostly I just liked the look of the word. The next weekend I
went into town and got the word SALOON printed in playbill on a red t-shirt. I still have it, and it still looks a bit shit.
Within a few weeks we assembled a group of people to join us.
Our housemate Nina could play trumpet, so she was in. She had a friend called
Steve who could play guitar and a friend called Natalie who could play viola,
both were in. Our friend Dee also volunteered herself, but she was a bass player, so she joined as bassist and I became leader ‘without portfolio’ for a
while.
One evening I went to see my friend Emma’s band playing
downstairs at the Alleycat. Emma was playing cello in a local group called
British Air Power. To be honest, I don’t remember much about the band, but the one-person
who did stick-out was their viola player. I recognised her from the Reading scene,
as a bit of a face from around town, probably the After Dark Club or Rockit the vintage clothes shop. On this evening she stood out because at the
end of every song she’d run to the bar and get another drink before running back
on stage. After the show we got chatting,
and she agreed to join the band.
So Saloon by this stage had a fairly unconventional line up
of two viola players, two bassists, a drummer, a trumpet player, one guitarist but
no singer. Although at no point had we managed to get us all in a room together. To rectify the singer issue Mike and I put a few adverts up in bars and music
shops. “Female Singer sought for Reading band. Influences,
Portishead,
Stereolab,
Velvets, Easy Listening.” Perhaps more telling was the disclaimer “musicianship
a bonus not a must”.
In my orange room over the next few days, I auditioned two
people. The first sung an acapella version of
Killing Me Softly. Her singing
was pretty terrible but what I disliked most was the fact that she sat on my bed
rather than my vintage
arkana
chair. Too forward. The other person to audition had seen the advert in the
local music shop with her boyfriend. She hadn’t heard of Stereolab (her
boyfriend told her they were boring anyway) but she was a fan of Portishead. I met her in
the car park of the local pub, so that her mum could see that I wasn’t some weirdo
out to pick-up girls (if I was I wouldn’t have listed Stereolab and
The Velvets on the advert anyway).
The singer was Amanda. She sat on the arkana chair and sung two songs, while
strumming my terribly cheap electric guitar. Those songs were
Sugar Boy by Beth
Orton and
Flowers in December by Mazzy Star. The versions I have posted here, I
found on a C90 and I am pretty sure this is her rehearsing for the audition.
She sung her songs through once, and I think I may have sung her back one of my own tunes (probably ‘I am the cheese’) and then I got Mike to come in and she sung
Sugar Boy again. You don’t need me to tell this to a Saloon fan, but her voice
was a revelation. I knew Mike was impressed because he became all giggly. In
the back of my mind though I was worried that at 17 she was a bit young for the band and wouldn’t stick with us for long, I also was a bit worried that her voice was going to be
drowned out by the rest of us, but I didn’t get to air those concerns. The
three of us got a bus to town and before we got off Amanda asked us if
she was in the band, Mike just laughed and said ‘Yeah’. So she was in. We went
and had some drinks to celebrate.
Now we had eight members. We didn’t ever all get in a
room together. I think we may have had one rehearsal with Amanda, Mike,
Natalie and Steve before Natalie and Steve left. Nina I don’t think we ever
heard her play the trumpet. She did inspire a song though, 'Nina Says', which
I wrote over Xmas in 1997.
On top of being an amazing singer, Amanda also had access to a rehearsal space which was a bonus, this was a room above The
Fox and Hounds pub in Caversham. By now I'd got a proper job so I spent my pay packet on a £500 PA. We had a couple more rehearsals
with Dee before she left. We weren’t rock enough for
her. The songs we had in our set at this stage were four of mine being ‘ Fuzzy Felt’ ‘Spacer’ ‘
I am the cheese’ and ‘Spectrum Colour Clash’, a
song of Amanda’s that I named ‘
Conquistador’ and a new one based on the last
days of Rome that I penned with Amanda who wrote the melody, which was called ‘Bring all your
love to me’.
Alison had by now joined
the band fully, but Mike was becoming concerned that we had quickly gone from 9
people to 4 and that we needed to do something before losing momentum.
Mike arranged for us to turn up at an acoustic session at a hippy
café called
Pangaea World Café Bar on London Street, Reading. We turned up in our
roll-neck jumpers and did our best to hog the evening. Mike took forever to set up
his snare and cymbals much to the annoyance of the organiser. Despite my
ineptitude on a guitar, I had been forced to move onto acoustic until we could find
a proper guitarist. Alison was on viola and Amanda sung and played a
Casio PSS-30.
We played three songs, ‘Fuzzy Felt’ ‘I am the cheese’ and ‘Spectrum Colour Clash’ before being ushered off. About half an hour later we were invited back on where we played ‘Bring all your love (to me)’. It was great to finally be
playing in public. The organiser said something about it being the start of
something big, or some similar cliché. Someone else said it was like seeing the
Velvets for the first time (they must have been really old and well-travelled to
have seen the Velvets the first time themselves).
After
Pangaea, our
confidence was up, but we knew we were missing something,
notably a half-decent guitar player. We put up some more adverts which stated ‘No
Pot-Noodling’ as, more than anything, I wanted to avoid getting a proper musician in the band and being found-out.
I am pretty sure only one person replied, certainly only one
person auditioned, which was Matt. His musical CV included some time in a funk band, he couldn’t play a barre-chord (I can still almost only play barre chords) but he was young,
keen, knew who Stereolab were, and most importantly turned up to his first
audition in a roll-neck.
The line-up was complete, and although we played two shows
in our career without Alison and had the occasional guest musician, the line-up
stayed the same five people for five and a half years. Only a few weeks after
Matt joined (basically as soon as he had mastered the E-Barre) chord, we played
our first gig at the Fox and Hounds in the very room we rehearsed in.
Unlike with Amanda, we didn’t tell Matt straight away that
he was in the band. He waited until after our second or third rehearsal to ask “Am
I in the band”
“Of course you’re in the f-ing band" we replied.
The rest, as they say, is anything but history.
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