FIRST GIGS First gigs are always, without exception, absolute crap. It would be wonderful if you had rehearsed so much that when you played that first gig, the audience would be stunned at the professionalism of the band, the quality of songwriting, the musical ability of the individuals, and then as the set ended, Mr Big from Big Records approached the band and offered you a massive five album deal worth a seven figure sum, with the immortal line "You guys are the best band I've ever seen and I'm going to make you all huge stars". You'd be whisked off to the South of France to record the debut single, and the next time you returned it would be in a Limo, on the way to the unveiling of a statue of yourself in the High Street. That's how everyone imagines it starting. Instead, what happens is that you are fifteen years old, you have been getting together with school-friends on Sunday afternoons for a few months, cramped into a bedroom with cheap casio keyboards, writing sub-Ultravox songs, and changing your line-up every two weeks. None of you can play a note, but it has been decided that it is time to start gigging. Someone from school has arranged a Scout Benefit at a local community centre, along with three other bands from your year, in two months time. You have no songs and no drummer, but you think "fuck it", write three simple songs and learn a couple of covers, call yourselves The Swinging Curtises after the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis who had hanged himself because you think it's quite funny, and start rehearsing at the local High School on a Thursday night. Two months seems like enough time to get it together, but with an ever fluctuating line-up you find that the weeks are passing by without the band getting anywhere. You recruit a drummer, singer, bass player and keyboardist, your second guitarist leaves, you replace your drummer, the bass player and keyboardist leave, the drummer takes up guitar, and you switch to bass. Then Christmas happens and the school is shut, meaning that you have lost another two weeks of rehearsal time. However, all this can't shake the belief that you are the best band in the world. And this belief doesn't disappear until half way through the set of your first gig. The soundcheck is great, being the first time that you've actually played in front of someone else, even if it is just the other bands, so you settle down to watch the other acts, who consist of Woodhenge (the cool prefects' band), Helm's Deep (the uncool prefects' band) and The Field (the anti- social art students' band). It has been decided that your band is to be last on by default, not because you're the best, but because no-one else wants make the claim of being worthy headliners. This doesn't worry you, as you don't see any of the others as competition. The Field have no friends and insist on being dark and industrial. Polite applause, but no cheers for them. Helm's Deep are so uncool (named from a Tolkein book, for God's sake!) that you know their friends shall clap, but they will be utterly crap. Then there's Woodhenge, and they turn out to be a different kettle of acoustic guitars. They had told you that they were folk, so you scoff at the idea of them even on the bill. I mean, who the hell wants to hear second rate Jethro Tull? For that matter, who wants to hear first rate Jethro Tull? But on the night they turn out instead to be The Pogues on speed. They play fast, chaotic and loud, and the crowd loves them. Guitar string break. Microphone stands fall down. They have a member called "Hank", made up in funeral tails and face-paint, who doesn't do anything but jump about and scream. Their songs are two and a half minute amphetamine folk epics with titles like "Do the briny stomp with Captain Ahab and the mental Moby Dick kill team" and "Dance you gnomes", all shout-along choruses and stamp along verses. And to make it even worse, they are on directly before you! There's no way that you are going to top their shambolic adrenaline act, and with this in your head you go on-stage, already defeated before you begin. Then the first song begins, and for some naive reason you assumed that the mix would be exactly the same as the soundcheck. It hasn't occurred to you that three other bands would change it in-between. This causes your backing vocal microphone to feedback throughout the entire first song, and you're too busy concentrating on playing bass to do anything about it. The lead vocal microphone is inaudible, and the guitar and bass are out of tune with each other. By the time the second song begins you want the set to end, but instead your thirty minutes takes three days, and every minute of that time it feels like the entire world is watching, but is too polite to laugh. And so for me, as with many others, this is how it all began. * * * CHANGING YOUR NAME #1 : After what I considered to be such a humiliating experience, the blame had to be placed somewhere, and according to our guitarist, Willie Moffat, the singer was a good place to start. "I've been meaning to talk to you about something" he said as we were loading his amplifier into his car afterwards, "but I'll phone you tomorrow." I hated being teased like that. "What is it about?" He looked around the car park, then dropped his voice real low. "I think that we should get rid of Alison. She really can't sing, and all my friends said that she was so out of tune tonight." Wow! That hit me like a thunderbolt! I hadn't noticed. In my own naive way I had assumed that we had the perfect band (give or take a drummer), and that all we had to do now was rehearse. I had been comparing Alison's singing to my own, and there was just no competition there. No matter how hard I tried, my voice was a pitiful, out of tune, nasal whine, and anybody would appear better next to it. I took the thought home with me that we would have to change, almost start again, and that coupled with the embarrassment of the gig kept me awake most of the night. To anyone else it was only a crappy school band, a hobby, but to me this was serious. The following day, over the phone, Willie and I decided to have one more rehearsal with Alison, just to check if she was as bad as he said (I still found it hard to believe), which we did the night after that. Sometimes, it's like a veil has been lifted, and you see things clearly. Or rather, hear things clearly. She screeched in a flat monotonous tone. How could I not have noticed that before? The next problem was how to get rid of her. I didn't want to tell her; I was really bad at those kind of things. I mean, I was at that time fourteen months into a relationship with a girl because I didn't know how to tell her that she was dumped. So Willie phoned Alison up and told her that the band had split up. It's a classic line that has been used many times by many bands, but at school it earned us the joking title of The Backstabbing Bastard Band. We decided that we had to distance ourselves from the old band as much as we could (as if anyone was watching), so a new name was needed. We drew up a list of names which ran over three pages long. Willie's were mostly two words put together (Drunken Aardvark, Tortoise Shout etc.) while mine were pretentious sounding names (Warhol In Warsaw, Warhol Daze) that revealed my 'O' level Art aspirations. In the end, Willie won out, and we renamed ourselves The Munchy Cousins, purely because the word "munchy" made us laugh. * * * NEW SINGERS #1 : An advert in the music column of the local paper, "The Falkirk Herald", turned up a drummer from nearby Grangemouth called Michael Davidson. Most drummers that I knew were just mastering the basics at that time, but he turned out to be more than competent, and powerful as well. Neither Willie or I wanted to sing, so I phoned up a girl that I knew from school, mainly because I really fancied her, but partly because she had been part of the local children's theatre, and could probably sing, and asked her to join. She said that she was too shy to do it, but recommended a friend of hers, Debbie Daisley, from a village a few miles outside Falkirk. Debbie tried out a couple of rehearsals, and was an improvement on Alison, but wasn't learning the songs fast enough. Or maybe we just didn't show her well enough. We would run once through the song with either Willie or myself singing, thrust a lyric sheet into her hands, and expect her to get it right first time. A fairly intimidating atmosphere for a sixteen year old female. This time it was my turn to phone our singer up and tell her that the band had split. * * * CHANGING YOUR NAME #2 : In those early days we would think nothing of booking a gig before we even had any songs, or even a band. Something would always turn up, and in this case it would have to show itself in time for the next gig in a fortnight's time. Three years above me at school there had been a load of bands that I had read about in the local paper. They were only eighteen or nineteen, and were just playing their first few gigs themselves, but at that age, a couple of years can make a huge difference. These guys seemed so grown up, and I wanted to be part of their scene. One way into it was simply to phone them up and ask to support them. For the past two years, the singer from one of these bands, The Fun Section, had organised a gig at The Workers and Social club in a village outside Falkirk called Whitecross. Actually, to call the venue a club is being a bit boastful. It was actually a wooden hut in the middle of a rough village kept afloat by a brickworks. So now that we had the gig, we just needed a singer. This time my girlfriend (the one that I mentioned before as being on the verge of being dumped for fourteen months) came to the rescue. She attended a different High School to me, and knew a different group of people, so she recommended a sixteen year old goth called Alan Benzie. Alan was most definitly weird. About five feet tall in real life, he added about another foot on with spiked hair, and stumbled about Falkirk wearing fishnet stockings under his black jeans. There were various great rumours about his unusual sex life going round, my favourite of which was the one where he had been caught masturbating into a tub of blackcherry yoghurt. But the thing was that he looked fantastic, sort of "out there", and at the age of sixteen, that was all that mattered. We had one rehearsal with him, and it didn't matter if he learned the songs or not, because he tended to just make up the tune and words as he went along. The strange thing is that he would stand with our vocal sheet in front of him as if he was reading from it, but the words coming from his mouth would bear no relation to what was written. The energy he helped generate really drove the band on, and with a drummer giving us more freedom and power, we felt as if it was a new band altogether, and of course that meant that the name would have to go. The Munchy Cousins had been very amusing at the time, but a week or so later it sounded very silly, so we went back to our list, and came up with Chainsaw Dance. It had the right amount of edge to it for our new buzz guitar sound, and it sounded good when we said it. * * * It felt like a big step to make, from being a school band, to playing a gig with other gigging bands. Okay, in Falkirk at the time, a gigging band meant that they had played more than one gig, even if they were just in local pubs, but it still felt like we were moving up. I felt honoured to be sharing the bill with the likes of The Fun Section, Political Asylum, The Bainbridge Silencers, and Temptin' Fate. Of course with hindsight, I can can say that they were all (and I'm most definitly including Chainsaw Dance here) utter crap. Political Asylum were a sub-metal band, muscled guitarist and bass player with long perms, and a skinny singer with glasses wearing a leather jacket that threatened to drag him to the floor, singing songs that "told the truth, man" in the same way as New Model Army. Temptin' Fate songs sounded as if they were written by a committee, taking all the worst parts of U2 (that delayed guitar sound that had been cool four years before) and blanding them out. Not that we were any better, but I was just glad to get through a set without any major disasters, playing in time and (almost) in tune. I had proven to myself that the first gig was a one-off. * * * 1/3/86 Community Centre, Laurieston : Another school gig, once again with Helm's Deep and The Field, but this time in aid of the local galaday. Because of our gig at Whitecross we were elevated to the headline act, and we rose to the occasion, playing a good set and encoring with a chaotic version of "Anarchy In The UK". Of course when I talk about playing well it's all relative. In those days a good gig was when we played a set without making too many mistakes. Energy made up for the rest. That night was a memorable for two things. Firstly inbetween the bands, myself and three others grabbed a drum each and proceeded to bash out three minute tribal punk rhythms which went down a storm with the crowd. And secondly our singer Alan saw The Field and decided that he would rather play guitar for them. So it was back to the drawing board I felt that I was changing. Playing in a band had really got the hook into me, and school just didn't seem important anymore. I had swanned through eight "o" grade the year before, but scraped through two of my highers out of five in May 1986 (English & Art). A few days after the Laurieston gig I broke up with my girlfriend. She had been my first ever girlfriend and I had been seeing her for sixteen months, but I felt that my priorities were changing and it was time to move on.