It was all very exciting and a little silly. We were in England, opening for Sonic Youth in March '89, barely a year after forming, talking to overly eager journalists from magazines we'd never read. You want our opinion? O.K. {"This sucks and that sucks, '77 punk rock, Blue Cheer, Big Muffs and Super Fuzz, Beer, Sub Pop and Seattle." Etc. and whatever, "where's the record store?"}.

Seven weeks of touring the mainland, losing our minds on good beer and long drives, and one nasty strip-search at the UK border later, we came back to play a few more shows and record a Peel Session. Now this we'd heard of! The Damned had recorded Peel sessions! We were a bit disappointed that John Peel himself wasn't there, but Buffin from Mott The Hoople was engineering, and that's worth something. Once we got going, it was over pretty quickly. We ran through three of our own and "You Make Me Die" by one of our UK heroes, Billy Childish. The songs sound pretty good to me, fast and loose. If we'd had more time, we probably would have turned down the reverb a bit overall, but it sounded great in the control booth that day. I'm not sure Buffin would agree; he seemed a little put off by the whole thing.

Over the next few years we came to England a lot, saw the Sub Pop Explosion turn into the Seattle Explosion and Alternative and all that nonsense. We still thoght it was exciting and silly and still didn't read those magazines. Unfortunatly, we didn't so any other BBC recordings until 1995. I wish we had done another one in '91 or so but no such luck.

By 1995 lots of things were different, and Grunge was very dead. The journalist weren't quite so eager to talk with us anymore. That's OK, the whole thing never made much sense to us anyway. The session this time around was fun, we blasted out three of our own again and a hastily learned version of Roxy Music's "Editions Of You". So hastily learned, we played one of the three chords wrong. It's still my favourite take of the song, even after we tried it a couple more times down the line. The version of "Poison Water Poisons The Mind" is a very early, half-finished job, and I think I like it more than the final version on Tomorrow Hit Today, too.

A few months later, we came back for our third Reading Festival, and a few other gigs. I knew things were different when the official programme for the festival gave us a lukewarm "They used to be better" review. Thanks for the $20,000 and the bad review! The show was fine, but clearly the love affair was over. Dan thought the whole tour sucked, I just tought most of it did. Either way, we never came back to tour the UK. We came back once more, in September '98 for one great gig at the Garage and some interviews. Those magazines we never read didn't come near us this time...

Thanks go out to a ton of people over there. We had a blast!

Steve Turner
January 2000