In the last couple of weeks, as I've been ploughing through old VHS videos and transferring them to DVD, I came across an extremely grainy video of a gig by Foreheads In A Fishtank. They were a fantastic 5-piece band from East London whose USP was having two keyboard players blasting ferociously noisy and unusual samples through a couple of enormous and battered amps.

Jez was a librarian. He stood on the left in a long-sleeved t-shirt, hammering away at his sampler. Matt was the other keyboard player; he stood quietly on the right, smoking heavily. Adrian, a graphic design genius, did his best to keep his drums in time with the samples. Gavin, a gorgeously erratic and very funny bass player, wobbled around with his eyes wide open. And at the front was the singer and guitarist, Jeff.

Jeff had, in a previous musical existence, sported a moustache, and released a single under his own name with a thigh-smackingly hilarious front cover which made him look like Midge Ure with a smaller wardrobe budget. Quite how he teamed up with the rest of the band, whose musical reference points were more Young Gods or The Swans than Ultravox, I'll never know; but at the beginning it worked beautifully, with his gentle crooning providing a soothing antidote to the blistering samples. Their gigs were sweaty affairs with shaven heads and way too much dry ice; my VHS video features a few blurred images moving in the distance in an angular fashion while the largish crowd lollops around in front, appreciatively.

As time went on, Jeff decided to switch regularly between his crooning style and a kind of guttural screech. The Keatons toured Europe with them in 1992, and while sitting backstage at La Rochelle someone decided that he sounded like Popeye. That was it. I couldn't listen to him again without dissolving into giggles. Lyrically he had began to be more concerned with bodily functions, with songs like “Jugs”, “Pussy”, “Predictor Test” and so on; so Kev, the singer of The Keatons at the time, only had to say the word “Bums” in a Popeye voice for us all to become helpless with laughter. When Jeff was out of the room, of course.

Jeff was quite a bit older than the rest of us, and thus less likely to put up with any crap on this tour. And there was, as always, a lot of crap. He kicked off a massive argument with a promoter at a squat in Lyon over 200 measly Francs, an incident that sent our guitarist back into a recurring episode of mental illness. Jeff consoled himself by picking up a fat ugly French girl after the show and bringing her on tour with us. As we left France to play a couple of gigs in Belgium on the way home, we got stopped at the border, and the guards discovered an E on the dashboard. Which is, of course, a Class A drug. Brilliant. “Sorry, lads,” said Jeff, the owner of the offending item, as all 11 of us were marched off to a small room, where a moustachioed Belgian border guard made us strip naked and bend over while he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. Jeff was lucky to get away with a fine, the rest of us were lucky to get away with mild embarrassment.

On the last night, we were in Ostend, starving, and we all decided to go and look for chips. Jeff preferred to stay canoodling with the French girl. “Oh, if you find any chips, will you bring me back some?” he said, as he plunged his hands into her underwear for the umpteenth time. We walked for 10 minutes and found a stall selling the most magnificent chips. We had double portions, and stuffed solid with deep fried potato we waddled back to our lodgings. “Did you find any chips?” asked Jeff, levering himself into an upright position. “No,” we all said, shrugging and shaking our heads. “Nothing at all. Sorry.” A small revenge, but a sweet one.