THE CHRISTMAS TREES

A STILL from the TV pilot for The Christmas Trees, a 50-minute festive special commissioned by the Cults Academy music department. The band were originally asked to perform on "Beechgrove Carol", the school's annual bash at the BBC, beamed into millions of homes around the North-east. While McPherson was delighted - "I can do my Columbo" - Tombola felt that singing carols with "a bunch of middle-class tossers in bobble hats" said nothing about life in the ghetto. When Rat pointed out that The Trees WERE middle-class tossers in bobble-hats, Styx suggested they subvert the show by singing out of key and making face at the camera. In the end the band were invited to submit their own show for consideration.

The Festive Trees was intended to be a "jolly roasting of guitars around the fire" but the band never got beyond producing this single still image. "Not having a video camera* was a big mistake," said McPherson. "You really need equipment to make a TV programme. We should have learned our lesson from the days when we played without guitars and couldn't understand why things sounded so flat and lifeless."

* Remarkably, video cameras had yet to be invented when McPherson made this remark. Always something of an inventor, he would later claim "if it wasn't for music I might have developed my idea for using a signal in the range 50 hertz to 5 megahertz to carry images and synchronising pulses for a TV broadcasting system. Some bastard beat me to it though, just as they did with my ventilated, midge-repellent spectacles."