Seymour
Fri 11th July, 2008
I was telling this story to Jenny the other night, and I did a speedy search through five years of blog entries and discovered, incredibly, that I'd not written properly about it on here. A stark omission, I'm sure you'll agree, not that you're in a position to agree, because I haven't told the story yet, but I'm about to.
So it's the 2nd of December 1989. I'd been living in London for two months, and I'd become an on-off member of The Keatons. They'd released their debut 7" about 6 weeks previously, and I'd guested on guitar at the launch party at the now-demolished Lady Owen Arms on Goswell Road; as the gigs continued I was ending up on stage for a larger and larger proportion of the set. Imagine it as someone edging themselves into a slightly shit spotlight without being asked. Tonight, a Saturday night, we were due to play what was unaffectionately known as an "all-dayer" at the also now-demolished Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park.
The Robey had a reputation for playing host to any old shit. Of course, you'd get dreck at the Falcon in Camden, you'd get horseshit at the Bull & Gate, but there was something about the Robey – probably its distance from the centre of Camden – that made it horribly unfashionable. The words "The Robey" were always uttered with a slight sigh and a rolling of the eyeballs, because you'd invariably be cranking out asymmetrical, distorted riffs to no-one in a dingy, foul-smelling, lager-sodden pit.
So the fact that we were at the Robey was bad enough, but there was this added curveball of the "all-dayer". I don't know if you get them any more, but they were a cunning ruse to cram in as many no-hoper bands on a single bill in the hope that the cumulative audience over 7 hellish hours might actually turn a profit for the promoter. At this time you also had to try and avoid the much-derided "pay-to-play" policy that many of them operated; aware of how desperate bands were to get a gig, promoters such as Jon "Fat" Beast would charge 10 or 20 quid for the dubious privilege of going onstage at 4.45 in the afternoon in front of two of your mates, a drug-addled soundman and Jon "Fat" Beast. "A slight waste of time," was the phrase Steve Keaton tended to use.
Fortunately this gig wasn't pay-to-play, but as we turned up at 6pm and heard some appalling band with metal shin pads pulverise the eardrums of a small group of anarchists and dogs on bits of string, we knew it would be rubbish. Some friends of ours, Spit Like Paint, were also on the bill and playing after us, so we sat down with them and bought what little weak lager we could afford while sitting the rest of this grim evening out.
And then a band called Seymour came onstage, who were unusual in a number of respects: a) they were young, b) they looked as if they washed occasionally, and c) they were stunningly good. They started with an instrumental, with the singer bashing out a slow oom-pah tune on a piano – like warped ragtime – and slowly the rest of the band all joined in and gradually sped up until the whole thing fell apart. Odd. And then they did 30 minutes of skewed pop music with noticably brilliant tunes which, on the London indie circuit in 1989, was depressingly rare. We stood up and went to watch them properly. I shouted in Steve's ear: "I'm amazed to admit that this lot are really good". The thing I remember most vividly is them playing a song called "Superman", which had us all beaming from ear to ear.
By going up to them afterwards and gushing about how great they were, they were thus obliged to stay and tolerate our set, which they seemed to really enjoy, so we swapped phone numbers and pledged to try and play on the same bill again. Two weeks later – during which time I'd been to see them play in front of 30 people at The Cricketers in Oval, where they told me that they were going to change their name to Blur – we heard that a band had dropped out of a Christmas gig organised by![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
scissorkicks in Harlow that we were playing at. We called Seymour up, and they said they'd do it. To my considerable irritation, I couldn't do the gig because of family Christmas stuff, but it was, by all accounts, a stormer. scissorkicks claims to have a VHS of the whole gig lying around somewhere. I should hassle him to dig it out – it's probably the only video of pre-Blur Seymour that exists, with embryonic, unpolished versions of She's So High and High Cool. And cute little songs like this.
The next time we played with them, they were called Blur, it was April, and they headlined at the Lady Owen Arms (capacity, er, 80?). They were noticably more professional, with a slight swagger, the edges had been rounded off a little – but they were still astonishing. Damon was an unpredictable loose cannon; a couple of weeks later at the Bull & Gate he would fall from the top of the speaker stack and break an arm, or a rib, or something. Over the summer they went into a posh studio, and when the time came for their first single to be released and for them to do their first UK tour, we got a call asking us to support.
[L-R: S. Keaton, D.Rowntree, G.Coxon)
We were the most shambolic band imaginable. I mean, really shoddy. And mid-way through the tour, just after a memorable gig in Bournemouth, we were chucked off by Blur's management for "unprofessionalism". I don't know why I'm using quotation marks. Unprofessionalism. Or, as it puts it in the Blur biography, "It became obvious that The Keatons were very wrong. Colleges and venues were getting hugely annoyed with this mad person throwing honey at the punters and leaving the stage in a horrific mess." I remember being dumbstruck and confused, more than angry. We were just incredibly naive, obviously had no ambitions to be massively famous, and we honestly couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. In retrospect, it's glaringly obvious what the problem was, and I'm surprised that my now highly-acute sense of embarrassment and shame never kicked in when we were clearly upsetting people. Blur had obviously been told that either we were chucked off the tour, or their tour was over. And so they looked horribly embarrassed and behaved slightly frostily when we showed up in Bristol and we were told we couldn't play. Some members of The Keatons were furious with them for not standing up for us, but hey, if you had to choose between a bunch of stinking blokes who sounded a bit like Wire and threw flour about, or global stardom, what would you choose? We were allowed to do one more gig with them in Oxford two weeks later – 15th November 1990 – and that was the last time I saw Blur play. Until, of course, they started getting on the telly.
Seymour were magnificent. Blur were, essentially, Seymour-lite. But they didn't half make some good tunes over the years. Oh, and that very first song I ever saw them play? It ended up on the Modern Life Is Rubbish album. And, thanks to the magic of YouTube, we can watch some watch some German teenagers waggle their heads to it. Technology, eh.
So it's the 2nd of December 1989. I'd been living in London for two months, and I'd become an on-off member of The Keatons. They'd released their debut 7" about 6 weeks previously, and I'd guested on guitar at the launch party at the now-demolished Lady Owen Arms on Goswell Road; as the gigs continued I was ending up on stage for a larger and larger proportion of the set. Imagine it as someone edging themselves into a slightly shit spotlight without being asked. Tonight, a Saturday night, we were due to play what was unaffectionately known as an "all-dayer" at the also now-demolished Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park.
The Robey had a reputation for playing host to any old shit. Of course, you'd get dreck at the Falcon in Camden, you'd get horseshit at the Bull & Gate, but there was something about the Robey – probably its distance from the centre of Camden – that made it horribly unfashionable. The words "The Robey" were always uttered with a slight sigh and a rolling of the eyeballs, because you'd invariably be cranking out asymmetrical, distorted riffs to no-one in a dingy, foul-smelling, lager-sodden pit.
So the fact that we were at the Robey was bad enough, but there was this added curveball of the "all-dayer". I don't know if you get them any more, but they were a cunning ruse to cram in as many no-hoper bands on a single bill in the hope that the cumulative audience over 7 hellish hours might actually turn a profit for the promoter. At this time you also had to try and avoid the much-derided "pay-to-play" policy that many of them operated; aware of how desperate bands were to get a gig, promoters such as Jon "Fat" Beast would charge 10 or 20 quid for the dubious privilege of going onstage at 4.45 in the afternoon in front of two of your mates, a drug-addled soundman and Jon "Fat" Beast. "A slight waste of time," was the phrase Steve Keaton tended to use.
Fortunately this gig wasn't pay-to-play, but as we turned up at 6pm and heard some appalling band with metal shin pads pulverise the eardrums of a small group of anarchists and dogs on bits of string, we knew it would be rubbish. Some friends of ours, Spit Like Paint, were also on the bill and playing after us, so we sat down with them and bought what little weak lager we could afford while sitting the rest of this grim evening out.
And then a band called Seymour came onstage, who were unusual in a number of respects: a) they were young, b) they looked as if they washed occasionally, and c) they were stunningly good. They started with an instrumental, with the singer bashing out a slow oom-pah tune on a piano – like warped ragtime – and slowly the rest of the band all joined in and gradually sped up until the whole thing fell apart. Odd. And then they did 30 minutes of skewed pop music with noticably brilliant tunes which, on the London indie circuit in 1989, was depressingly rare. We stood up and went to watch them properly. I shouted in Steve's ear: "I'm amazed to admit that this lot are really good". The thing I remember most vividly is them playing a song called "Superman", which had us all beaming from ear to ear.
By going up to them afterwards and gushing about how great they were, they were thus obliged to stay and tolerate our set, which they seemed to really enjoy, so we swapped phone numbers and pledged to try and play on the same bill again. Two weeks later – during which time I'd been to see them play in front of 30 people at The Cricketers in Oval, where they told me that they were going to change their name to Blur – we heard that a band had dropped out of a Christmas gig organised by
scissorkicks in Harlow that we were playing at. We called Seymour up, and they said they'd do it. To my considerable irritation, I couldn't do the gig because of family Christmas stuff, but it was, by all accounts, a stormer. scissorkicks claims to have a VHS of the whole gig lying around somewhere. I should hassle him to dig it out – it's probably the only video of pre-Blur Seymour that exists, with embryonic, unpolished versions of She's So High and High Cool. And cute little songs like this.The next time we played with them, they were called Blur, it was April, and they headlined at the Lady Owen Arms (capacity, er, 80?). They were noticably more professional, with a slight swagger, the edges had been rounded off a little – but they were still astonishing. Damon was an unpredictable loose cannon; a couple of weeks later at the Bull & Gate he would fall from the top of the speaker stack and break an arm, or a rib, or something. Over the summer they went into a posh studio, and when the time came for their first single to be released and for them to do their first UK tour, we got a call asking us to support.
[L-R: S. Keaton, D.Rowntree, G.Coxon)
We were the most shambolic band imaginable. I mean, really shoddy. And mid-way through the tour, just after a memorable gig in Bournemouth, we were chucked off by Blur's management for "unprofessionalism". I don't know why I'm using quotation marks. Unprofessionalism. Or, as it puts it in the Blur biography, "It became obvious that The Keatons were very wrong. Colleges and venues were getting hugely annoyed with this mad person throwing honey at the punters and leaving the stage in a horrific mess." I remember being dumbstruck and confused, more than angry. We were just incredibly naive, obviously had no ambitions to be massively famous, and we honestly couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. In retrospect, it's glaringly obvious what the problem was, and I'm surprised that my now highly-acute sense of embarrassment and shame never kicked in when we were clearly upsetting people. Blur had obviously been told that either we were chucked off the tour, or their tour was over. And so they looked horribly embarrassed and behaved slightly frostily when we showed up in Bristol and we were told we couldn't play. Some members of The Keatons were furious with them for not standing up for us, but hey, if you had to choose between a bunch of stinking blokes who sounded a bit like Wire and threw flour about, or global stardom, what would you choose? We were allowed to do one more gig with them in Oxford two weeks later – 15th November 1990 – and that was the last time I saw Blur play. Until, of course, they started getting on the telly.
Seymour were magnificent. Blur were, essentially, Seymour-lite. But they didn't half make some good tunes over the years. Oh, and that very first song I ever saw them play? It ended up on the Modern Life Is Rubbish album. And, thanks to the magic of YouTube, we can watch some watch some German teenagers waggle their heads to it. Technology, eh.