"In some respects , The Front Lawn was very much a grab-bag of possibilities -anything we woke up in the morning thinking would get thrown into a piece; would probably become a piece. It might be one minute long and it might be a song or it might be a little piece of dialogue - or it might be a completely mime thing. Anything could be in a Front Lawn piece and that’s completely opposed to the kind of rigorous rule-based organic sort of quality that From Scratch had. 

So in some ways The Front Lawn was kind of a reaction against the strictures of being in From Scratch. It was the strangest thing, because we started off taking ourselves quite seriously in the rehearsal room. [We had] quite high flown ideas about our culture, and about men - because we sat down facing each other saying “what are we going to make pieces about? What have we got? We’re not oppressed. We’re not minorities. We come from good homes, we’re talented. Basically we should just shut up really, because we’re gonna get good jobs at some stage. What have we got? We’re men! That’s right!” So quite often stuff would come out about men and initially - this is terrible to admit to anybody - initially we wanted to call ourselves The Y-Fronts because it seemed that a lot of the ideas were to do with maleness. Thank heavens we didn’t call ourselves The Y-Fronts. 

But anyway, we’d have these serious ideas, we’d make these pieces which didn’t have punch lines. A lot of them were about madness. A lot of them were about what happens when you step outside of what’s normal, what happens when your responses aren’t appropriate - [like] that whole piece, the “How You Doing” dance which we used to do."
 
 

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