The Frank Sidebottom gig at the Bull & Gate on Saturday was a hoot.

It used to be the case, during days of abject poverty, that I'd spend the time between the soundcheck and the gig eating a bag of chips that cost 70p (I understand they're more than a quid now, what with the soaring price of potatoes over the last 20 years) and making a pint of Fosters last 4 hours. These days I've got a credit card, so we went to Pizza Express down the road, in a building which, as I remember, used to be North London Polytechnic. Maybe it's still North London Polytechnic and they just sold off their canteen to be converted into a Pizza Express. Anyway, it has the feel of a student canteen, except it had flowers, and babies, and avocados, and wine. "Could I have a glass of red wine?" asked Jess. "WHAT?" snapped the waitress, in a way that suggested that this mild request had pushed her to the absolute limit, despite the place being virtually empty. We all looked at her, aghast, wondering what we'd done wrong. "Oh, I am sorry," she backpedalled apologetically, "my English not so good." I imagined her English classes, and whether they consisted of the teacher enunciating a simple phrase, and sullen students barking back "WHAT?" or "HUH?" or, conceivably, "YOUR TEACHING METHODS LEAVE MUCH TO BE DESIRED."

Anyway, back to the gig. We'd had one rehearsal, and that was probably too much; Frank had criticised us in the soundcheck for being "too slick". While pissing about in the rehearsal room we had spontaneously developed a version of the old Rugby Special theme tune. To commit this magnum opus to memory, I balanced my phone on the keyboard and made a video of it.



sexyworld was so taken with this that he decided we were now a band called Dream Themes who do inept covers of TV theme tunes. We're playing at the Buffalo Bar on November 8th. In showbusiness, you've got to move fast when you have ideas like this. Before you realise that they're complete shit.

Sunday night I went with my dad to Hackney Empire to watch Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry is 82, but still managed to pull off a duck walk, which I can't do at 36. He also had a refreshingly laissez-faire attitude towards playing wrong notes on guitar, or singing out of time, but frankly if you can't get away with that as a rock'n'roll star at the age of 82, you never can. So everyone clapped along appreciatively, and cheered him to the rafters after each song, and then after about 70 minutes he quietly slipped away at the back of the stage and didn't come back. We cheered for an encore; the support act, Mick Jagger's brother, came on and did a song instead. So, something of an anticlimax, but again, you could hardly blame Chuck Berry for saying "Nah, bollocks, I can't be arsed", or however Americans say that kind of thing. Mick Jagger's brother, incidentally, did a bloody terrible song about Tibet earlier in the evening. Heart in the right place, dreadful lyrics which I've fortunately erased from my memory, but he managed to shoehorn "Dalai Lama" in there, that's all you need to know.

EDIT: I've just realised that the phrase "slipped away" in reference to Chuck Berry above might not be entirely appropriate. I mean he walked off, waving.

Paul bought 4 blancmange-coloured shirts for £2.50 each from Matalan for our stage gear.

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Wo!

I don't really follow football or have much interest in it, but my long-term buddy Kevin has been getting upset on his MySpace blog over the fact that his team, Luton Town, have been deducted 30 points by the Football League and the Football Association, so they start next season with -30 points before they've even kicked a ball. And are probably doomed to non-league football in 2009. When I visited scissorkicks on Sunday and had a delicious barbecue with members of The Knockouts (also Luton Town supporters) they were similarly depressed.

But nothing sums up their depression quite like this image constructed by Kevin and posted on his blog which, I'm ashamed to say, had me squeaking with hilarity for about a minute:

I was telling this story to Jenny the other night, and I did a speedy search through five years of blog entries and discovered, incredibly, that I'd not written properly about it on here. A stark omission, I'm sure you'll agree, not that you're in a position to agree, because I haven't told the story yet, but I'm about to.

So it's the 2nd of December 1989. I'd been living in London for two months, and I'd become an on-off member of The Keatons. They'd released their debut 7" about 6 weeks previously, and I'd guested on guitar at the launch party at the now-demolished Lady Owen Arms on Goswell Road; as the gigs continued I was ending up on stage for a larger and larger proportion of the set. Imagine it as someone edging themselves into a slightly shit spotlight without being asked. Tonight, a Saturday night, we were due to play what was unaffectionately known as an "all-dayer" at the also now-demolished Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park.

The Robey had a reputation for playing host to any old shit. Of course, you'd get dreck at the Falcon in Camden, you'd get unmitigated crap at the Bull & Gate, but there was something about the Robey – probably its distance from the centre of Camden – that made it horribly unfashionable. The words "The Robey" were always uttered with a slight sigh and a rolling of the eyeballs, because you'd invariably be cranking out asymmetrical, distorted riffs to no-one in a dingy, foul-smelling, lager-sodden pit.

So the fact that we were at the Robey was bad enough, but there was this added curveball of the "all-dayer". I don't know if you get them any more, but they were a cunning ruse to cram in as many no-hoper bands on a single bill in the hope that the cumulative audience over 7 hellish hours might actually turn a profit for the promoter. At this time you also had to try and avoid the much-derided "pay-to-play" policy that many of them operated; aware of how desperate bands were to get a gig, promoters such as Jon "Fat" Beast would charge 10 or 20 quid for the dubious privilege of going onstage at 4.45 in the afternoon in front of two of your mates, a drug-addled soundman and Jon "Fat" Beast. "A slight waste of time," was the phrase Steve Keaton tended to use.

Fortunately this gig wasn't pay-to-play, but as we turned up at 6pm and heard some appalling band with metal shin pads pulverise the eardrums of a small group of anarchists and dogs on bits of string, we knew it would be rubbish. Some friends of ours, Spit Like Paint, were also on the bill and playing after us, so we sat down with them and bought what little weak lager we could afford while sitting the rest of this grim evening out.

And then a band called Seymour came onstage, who were unusual in a number of respects: a) they were young, b) they looked as if they washed occasionally, and c) they were stunningly good. They started with an instrumental, with the singer bashing out a slow oom-pah tune on a piano – like warped ragtime – and slowly the rest of the band all joined in and gradually sped up until the whole thing fell apart. Odd. And then they did 30 minutes of skewed pop music with noticably brilliant tunes which, on the London indie circuit in 1989, was depressingly rare. We stood up and went to watch them properly. I shouted in Steve's ear: "I'm amazed to admit that this lot are really good". The thing I remember most vividly is them playing a song called "Superman", which had us all beaming from ear to ear.

By going up to them afterwards and gushing about how great they were, they were thus obliged to stay and tolerate our set, which they seemed to really enjoy, so we swapped phone numbers and pledged to try and play on the same bill again. Two weeks later – during which time I'd been to see them play in front of 30 people at The Cricketers in Oval, where they told me that they were going to change their name to Blur – we heard that a band had dropped out of a Christmas gig organised by scissorkicks in Harlow that we were playing at. We called Seymour up, and they said they'd do it. To my considerable irritation, I couldn't do the gig because of family Christmas stuff, but it was, by all accounts, a stormer. scissorkicks claims to have a VHS of the whole gig lying around somewhere. I should hassle him to dig it out – it's probably the only video of pre-Blur Seymour that exists, with embryonic, unpolished versions of She's So High and High Cool. And cute little songs like this.

The next time we played with them, they were called Blur, it was April, and they headlined at the Lady Owen Arms (capacity, er, 80?). They were noticably more professional, with a slight swagger, the edges had been rounded off a little – but they were still astonishing. Damon was an unpredictable loose cannon; a couple of weeks later at the Bull & Gate he would fall from the top of the speaker stack and break an arm, or a rib, or something. Over the summer they went into a posh studio, and when the time came for their first single to be released and for them to do their first UK tour, we got a call asking us to support.



[L-R: S. Keaton, D.Rowntree, G.Coxon)

We were the most shambolic band imaginable. I mean, really shoddy. And mid-way through the tour, just after a memorable gig in Bournemouth, we were chucked off by Blur's management for "unprofessionalism". I don't know why I'm using quotation marks. Unprofessionalism. Or, as it puts it in the Blur biography, "It became obvious that The Keatons were very wrong. Colleges and venues were getting hugely annoyed with this mad person throwing honey at the punters and leaving the stage in a horrific mess." I remember being dumbstruck and confused, more than angry. We were just incredibly naive, obviously had no ambitions to be massively famous, and we honestly couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. In retrospect, it's glaringly obvious what the problem was, and I'm surprised that my now highly-acute sense of embarrassment and shame never kicked in when we were clearly upsetting people. Blur had obviously been told that either we were chucked off the tour, or their tour was over. And so they looked horribly embarrassed and behaved slightly frostily when we showed up in Bristol and we were told we couldn't play. Some members of The Keatons were furious with them for not standing up for us, but hey, if you had to choose between a bunch of stinking blokes who sounded a bit like Wire and threw flour about, or global stardom, what would you choose? We were allowed to do one more gig with them in Oxford two weeks later – 15th November 1990 – and that was the last time I saw Blur play. Until, of course, they started getting on the telly.

Seymour were magnificent. Blur were, essentially, Seymour-lite. But they didn't half make some good tunes over the years. Oh, and that very first song I ever saw them play? It ended up on the Modern Life Is Rubbish album. And, thanks to the magic of YouTube, we can watch some watch some German teenagers waggle their heads to it. Technology, eh.

Dicky and Rob and sexyworld and I become the Oh Blimey Big Band a week tomorrow for a Frank Sidebottom gig at the Bull & Gate.

Tickets here, just in case anyone fancies it.

Speaking of which, here's a rotten video of Frank dying on his arse in a New York club:



I particularly like the chap in the comments section who threatens to "kick his ass to a pulp" for ruining a Fall song. I've never seen Frank threatened with physical violence at a gig, but it must have happened, surely.