Okay – the song is actually from 2014… the video is new though. I finished it yesterday. It’s an animation made out of simple graphics (at least one of which appeared quite a lot in Wild Poppy posters/t-shirts/badges), and a photo of fence/sky on a moody day take on the road just north of the town Ian was living in, before he moved upstairs, so to speak.
Alan played me this song that he’d recorded in his front-room, and I was all “Far out – that’s excellent, we should make a studio version of it”, so we got me and Rich and Alan and Benny (a really proficient bass-player from my home town – Wanganui)… and spent a couple of days recording it.
Not quite The Wild Poppies, because Andrew was in Portugal – and to this very day, Alan has kept the identity of the girl singing it a secret. I think she’s in Christchurch now.
We basically spent one day recording and mixing, and another day trying to get rid of imaginary cricket-sounds that only Alan could hear. He can still hear them apparently. I included cricket sounds at the beginning of the video just to be annoying. I also quite like cricket sounds.
… we pull our VW round the side of the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, and there’s already some fucker there – a van totally blocking the entire carpark.
Green milk-truck… with about a THOUSAND amps and speaker cabs and flight-cases and what-not in the back, being unloaded by these… people.
My first thought was… “Jesus… they’ve got really rough roadies in the UK”, and I felt this massive sense of dread… a bit like my first day of school, when the first thing I saw was this massive sign over the school gate saying “NO SPAZMOS”. Oh fuck I though.
They looked a bit like the band off this:
But they were the roadies.
God knows what the actual band were like. Unimaginable. We parked outside and went into the bar-bit downstairs and got a beer. Sat around the table, not really saying a whole lot. One pint, 4 straws.
(Time passes)
After a while one of roadies from earlier appears… looks around… I was all “Oh shit, he’s coming over here”.
Comes over, crouches down at our table… and with creamily devastating English charm says “We’ve gone over time a bit – you’re probably not going to get a sound-check. It’s all going to be a bit rock and roll I’m afraid” – with a smile that could knock birds out of trees, and we’re all “yea, ok, sure – no worries”
It was this guy:
Not an actual roadie apparently.
Turns out that none of them were. These people. The band:
Shake Appeal – probably biggest band in Oxford at the time; definitely the loudest. By the time we went on, the place was absolutely rammed to the ceiling with misfits and fringe-dwellers – mixtures of man-alive. Earth People. It was a LOT better than any of the London gigs I’d been to in the previous year. It fucking went off man. Bedlam.
…
Tips for Newbies?
Never do your first gig (with a new-band-config) in front of a big audience. There are a load of technical issues that you only find out about by experience. Me? It was not turning up with an extension chord. I played the entire gig standing by the back wall of the stage facing sideways towards the drum-kit, because that’s all the 1m long cable that came with the echo machine would allow.
I think we did a good gig. No idea. We probably didn’t – it definitely didn’t matter. People were leaning all over the stage and yelling stuff and spilling their beer. Hellish crusties and gorgeous Oxford chicks and wall-eyed-maniacs, and the whole place just fucking… shouting. 8-deep at the bar and people falling out of windows. It rocked.
I slept in the car that night… or like didn’t sleep… head a-buzzing and a-blaze with having just blundered into something utterly amazing – far better and far worse than I could possibly have imagined.
Everyone (for years afterwards) would ask “Why Oxford? no bands ever came from here. You’re fools etc. Foooooools”… that was before Radiohead, Ride, Swervedriver, Supergrass, Foals and a whole load of others.
So many bands came from Oxford that someone actually made a documentary about all the bands that came from Oxford, which had everyone in it, except us….
…even though it was literally us (and specifically, me) that started the whole thing.
Ok – that’s not strictly true… I don’t know who started it all. Someone from the 17th C probably. Bobbie Gillespie perhaps. Lost in the mists of time. That said, the reason we moved there, is that there was already a pretty good music scene there – a lot of which was to do with Dave Newton.
He was running a local (ie: Thames Valley) music magazine, and putting on gigs etc. He’s probably the main reason we moved to Oxford, and probably the main reason that a whole lot of music that started in Oxford, wound up growing out of the place, and moving up to that London. He organised our first gigs for us, put us in touch with whoever we needed to get in touch with, paid for our EP… and a whole lot more besides. He did this for a lot of people.
He went through over 5000 haircuts before he settled on this one.
Dave is one of those super-fans who manage to create entire environments where people who would otherwise be disparate wastrels can come together. Oxford should really put up a statue of him somewhere. God, he’d absolutely hate that.
Much as I love her, Susan was driving me mad at that point, so in order to avoid getting a flat together, when we moved to Oxford, I lived in a car for about 4 months. (the bullet-proof logic of a 20-something teenager)
I have no idea how I managed to explain that one to her – we hadn’t split up, but were arguing bitterly every 2nd day… and I’d had enough. The plan was that I’d get a flat after she did, and in the meantime I’d live in a car (which was a mini).
This was at exactly the same time that Boris Johnson and that pig-shagging one were doing their Bullingdon Club thing – destroying restaurants etc, before they destroyed the UK economy, and (possibly)(at the time of writing) the UK itself.
When it started getting colder, me and Rich went through a phase of breaking into houses that were being painted/done-up so we’d have somewhere to sleep… then breaking out again at about 6am before the builders came. It was me that booked all the gigs (for some reason) – so the big challenge was to find a public-phone-box that took phone-cards, and wasn’t on a main road. There were two of those in the whole of Oxford. That’s how we got our early gigs.
Holy shit – it’s still there:
That’s the phone-box I used to book the early poppies gigs when I was living in a car.
That’s one of the nice things about Oxford – things don’t change a whole lot – pretty much all the old red phoneboxes in the UK got ripped up and replaced with plasticy green ones in the 90s… here’s another one… with Vicky.
This one is in Camden (3 years later), at the end of the street that our squat was on. Even in those days, the locals were so middle-classed that they managed to get an Historic-Building protection order placed on it, so BT couldn’t replace it with one of those nasty new ones. There’s a little brass plaque inside. No need to do that in Oxford because the entire place has this great big invisible snow-globe dome over it, and everything inside is protected forever from… capitalism basically. Ironically.
…
Anyway, eventually Susan got a flat… so then I got a flat (to be fair, the whole band did – shared this big house with Swervedriver)… and she came round to mine, and only went back to her place once… to pick up her stuff.
I’m not sure how that came about… why I was such a push-over… possibly because I loved the fucking fuck out of her, possibly because the only thing I can remember about her place was me taking a load of shrooms and getting stomach-cramps… attempting to vomit these tiny iridescent/technicolor tadpole like things (all singing discordantly) into her bathroom sink. I was in a state of heightened suggestibility.
So we all moved into this great big house – two bands… moderately feral, but at least it had a phone.
And it was in East Oxford, which was cool. Kindof crustie/hippie/punk place, with a pub on every corner (pretty much), although everyone went to the Temple bar on account of there being one of those football-table games. When the pub shut, everyone would go and get chips, then all go back to someone’s house and smoke A TON of dope. Everyone was unemployed. Everyone was in bands. It rocked. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
We were there for about 3 or 4 months… long enough to learn to play; to get a set together. To gel as a band, and as people.
We bought all the gear we needed (no idea how)(I mean really, how the fuck did we do that?) – set up with a vocal PA in the main room of a remote cottage. There was a kitchen where the sink would freeze over at night, and another room, filled will old sofas and with a wood-fire, that we would crash out in smoking utterly insaniac quantities of hash. Didn’t drink that much in those days… that would come later.
For me at least. For some reason, every night at about 8pm, the electricity would lose about 20% of its “quality”. All the lights would suddenly dim.
That was where we first met Rich – who would later become our manager.
Although that is (I suspect) technically a Swervedriver gig as evidenced by the presence of the Ghost of James Partridge, sitting blurrily to the left. Everyone was kindof blurry in those days.
Not sure why.
We were all into mystical shit. We were twenty-something-teenagers. Goes with the territory in some ways, and there’s really no better place to do it than under the Black Mountains in some remote winter mega-canabinated halcyon hallucination. Not much I can remember now (like most things)… wild horses coming out of the mist at the top of the Brecon Beacons… an abandoned church that we were all too spooked to go into (apart from Alan who went in and started digging up the floor, looking for artefacts etc). It was cold, but like warm at the same time.
There was this abandoned cottage up the road into the hills – dirt floor and made out of stone blocks – not lined inside – just bare stone. No idea how old it was. Old. No water or wires etc. It looked like the people who lived there had just got up from the table, and randomly left… there was still cutlery and stuff on it. I found 4 rusty old scythe-blades hanging from a tree outside – which I stole (you’ve got to steal something). Seemed appropriate. No idea where they are now. Probably back in the tree.
In a way (and from the inside), this was the best time for The Wild Poppies – still living in the dream-zone, before the grimy-reality of the British post-punk music scene hit us. No idea where we got the drugs from… but something I’ve noticed with drugs – if you want them, they find you.
So anyway – we got a new set together, and became reasonably tight musically. To get really tight, you’ve got to play live I think, but we were pretty good. There’s a fairly major difference between the stuff we did before Wales and after.
Wales is so beautiful. No wonder the magic mushrooms decided to live there – that’s where I’d live if I was a magic mushroom and who knows, maybe one day I will be. I like Wales – every time I go west over that massive bridge, I get this massive wave of relief. The further west I go, the better I feel.
…
Anyhoo – I’d lived in London for a year, and the music scene there was mean and judgemental – the arse-end of goth, recycled into some sort of pastey-faced pantomime. Everyone seemed to have weird noses. It was kindof intimidating. We figured we needed to be within striking distance of London… but somewhere a bit friendlier. Shortlist: Oxford, Bristol. We chose Oxford. No famous bands had ever come from Oxford, but there was quite a good scene there… so… one day we loaded up the van, and headed back down the M4.
Alan had been in the UK for six months before he told anyone he was there.
He’d left New Zealand and had rented a remote cottage in Wales – set it up as a rehearsal space; bought a VW combi van to convert into a tour-bus… then one cold winter’s morning on the way back to the cottage, hit some ice and went off the road – over a steep bank, rolled twice and wound up in a frozen field back on its wheels again. Some sheep looked up.
Blood on snow? Nope
Right way up? Yup
Engine still running? Yup
So he drove across the field, out the gate and off down the road as though nothing had happened. Nobody saw, and if nobody saw, then in practical terms, what had actually happened may/may-not have actually been real. Objective reality still floated in some indecisive cannabinoid half-space of quantum indeterminacy. Nobody saw.
Nobody ever saw The Wild Poppies either. Very few at least, and I suspect that those few that did can actually remember it now. I certainly can’t, and I was IN the Wild Poppies. For years. No trace… but there is a corner of some Welsh field that will forever be… bits of broken wing-mirror.
Don’t bother looking for them. They’re not there.
…
There will be (I suppose) a vanishingly small number of you, to whom those words have a certain familiarity…
… if so, the reason is most likely to be that they are the sleeve-notes for the newly re-released thing. In a way, they should have been “page one” or “intro” or whatever – that was actually the first thing written in this thing I’m writing now.
A couple of points:
1) I don’t know if it’s true
a) I have vivid memories of stuff that nobody else (who was there) actually remembers.
b) Other people can remember things that I know definitely didn’t happen.
c) I have (over the years) taken enough drugs to doubt my own recollections
d) and so has everyone else.
2) Objective (ish) proof does actually exist
I wrote home to my mum in NZ, every day for 20 years… I’d keep a couple of pages of A4…. write a bit every day, and when I had enough to post (about once a week), I’d post it… she has kept all my letters in ring-binders.
I’m still too scared to read them. The past hurts. I think.
I mean I spend a lot of time there… but the actual written words of the kid writing to his mum and dad are too close to the bone for me to want to face. So I haven’t read them… but I guess I will. I guess I should.
But not today.
3) From here on in, everything goes out of order
I’m Gen-X. We were brought up to do “beginning middle end”, but then we wrote the internet (or at least the first draft), and all that went out the window, to be replaced by
“there’s not really any lesson to be learned from this – it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened”
– Homer Simpson. We’re the same age.
Anyway – the next instalment will be about Wales I guess… after that, it will be all over the place like a crazy-person’s piss.
Not sure how to deal with the end. I can remember sitting on a kid’s swing in the back-yard in Oxford… just kindof quietly crying I guess – and Rich (our manager)(gently) going “is it worth it?”
I don’t think it has ended.
We got a fairly substantial royalty cheque 30 years after we released the first record, and we’ve decided to invest it in setting up a boutique marijuana business… when the war has ended.
We’re into the Age of Atemporality anyway – nothing begins, middles, or ends the way it once did.
…
I think I’ll get into the habit of putting a random youtube video at the end of each post. I don’t know how much of this will be connected with the band… probably ought to… but then this is going to be a whole lot more subjective than it ought to be anyway… and the atemporal-factor will go up.
Anyway… I love this lot:
am listening to them on youtube as I write this. Went all the way to Sweden to see them play once… they put me on the list but I was too shy to talk to them after on account of being sober – in my 2-year abstinence period which happened on account of managing to lure 3 girls back to my room in Hong Kong and they gave me rohypnol and did a number on my credit-cards… and I was utterly convinced (in the bludgeoning aftermath) that they’d also given me AIDs.
So I did a deal with the sky… “if you get me out of this, I’ll never drink again”.
And the sky smiled.
Then about 2 years of white-knuckled sobriety later, I looked up at the sky and said “That’s not really how deals with you work is it?”
… a year or so goes by… I’m in England… kindof fucked, kindof stuck – by this point I was living in a squat in fucking “Pimlico”… which happened because I befriended Ant – who’s girlfriend worked in the anti-squatting department of the local council, so had a list of the best places to squat, so we chose the one at the top of the list… posh neigbourhood (posh neighbourhoods are shit).
And then me and Thompson (actual name Susan, but I call her Thompson, because my heart is breaking – her surname is Thompson)… went to this massive gig in Finsbury park in London.
It was fucking pandemonium.
It started out in daylight, it wound up dark. The videos of it are kindof blurry:
Mary’s band – I can remember fucking Clint getting up on stage in his underpants (which was disturbing – boxer shorts weren’t invented yet), and dancing about.. and after the first song Mary was all “Ok Clint, fuck off now, we’ve got to get on with the gig”, and Clint was like “No way man, I’m here for the innings”.
Which he was for a bit. Sometime later during Clint’s gig someone was gobbing at the other singer guy, and he just looked at him for a bit… judging him etc, then jumped off the stage and fucking punched the cunt.
I was so impressed I almost fell over sideways. This moment would come back to haunt me.
And Hawkwind played – with actual Lemmy etc – some audience random climbed up the central supporting structure and wouldn’t come down even tho they shouted at him thru the PA and such… eventually shot him with a laser-beam from the lighting rig, and he fell off like an autumn leaf… even though lighting-rig laser-beams are basically really bright, concentrated flashlights.
I drunk a ton of cider.
I had never seen so many weirdos in my life. It was brilliant – back in NZ everyone was a total cunt from the 80s. (Me and Thomspon called them “custard squares”. They looked liked the fucking pet-shop boys or whatever – their trousers came up past their belly-buttons. God I hated those people.)
This was new – there was about 30,000 people who were just like us.
I wrote a letter to my old band back in NZ… (Phones had been invented yet) – I told them to come over.
It was going to be brilliant. It was going to be funny and exciting etc. There are 30,000 weirdos just like us. Come over.
So I wrote that on a piece of paper, put a stamp on it, and they came.
We met about 2 years later – 25 years later, I still get flashbacks. She’s got a smile that curls up at the edges and it makes my whole heart/brain turn to a cross between sherbet and jello – she’s as clever as fuck, and I love her and I miss her.
About 10 years after we broke up we were in a band together – she sacked me after about a month for being a drunken cantankerous wanker, and I can’t argue with that – I was well into the downward arc at that point. I’ve got a couple of MP3s of her band… they’re really good. Smoky, misty-eyed… one day I’ll post them here (or they’ll be lost like tears in rain), but not today.
Meantime… I told The Wild Poppies they should to come over, and they did.
Which kindof surprised me at the time. Still. There it is.
A year or so went by… The Poppies did an NZ tour, and released a single:
One of the songs of which is here:
Which I did not in fact play on, on account of not being there. Robert Axford took over from me.
Top bloke – kindof American, German, Kiwi hybrid. I think. I like Rob.
The Wild Poppies were kindofa hybrid kindofa band – there have been times when I’ve been tempted to say that “I was the only normal one”, but that hasn’t really worked out that well for me. I’m en-route to out-black-sheeping pretty much everyone I know, apart from Ian of course… I get it now, I really do. I zigged when I should have zagged back in 94. I found a demon – and I’ll tell you what it is: Money. I learned how to make money, and it completely fucked me up, mainly because I spent almost all of it on drugs.
Anyway – Black-sheep. I think that’s probably what every good band is – 4 or 5 black-sheep of various families, who answer a random advert, and then like, marry each other (or whatever) and spend the next 5 years in the back of a transit van, smoking dope and driving round The Midlands, playing to dozens of other black sheep.
So anyway, Rob is the only Wild Poppy I haven’t actually been in a band with… which is a pity. I think he’s probably smarter than the rest of us put together. I’d like to be in a band with Rob, but we’re both lead-guitarists, so that would never work. I mean it’d be worse than this – which is ACTUAL FOOTAGE from a Wild Poppies rehearsal.
Still, if Rob rang up tomorrow and said “we should form a band”, I’d say “yes”.
…
Anyway… The Wild Poppies etc. For a year I wasn’t there. I was elsewhere.
Went to Aus to make enough money to get to England… then went to England…
Okay – not literally the last… just the last gig that I ever did in New Zealand.
This one was in a Mexican restaurant in Wellington… or… a building that I’d been to about a year before when it was a Mexican restaurant, and now it was this massive red-brick (mmm lovely) lined hall on one of those alleys off the back of Dixon Street or whatever.
It was non-descript.
I remember only one thing about this gig – and that was everyone laughing at me.
There we were… we turned up… we had our sound-check… we hung about, then someone said “ok, time to go on”.
“What?” I wailed, “There’s no one here yet!”
I was such an innocent back then – I had literally never been to a gig that wasn’t sold out. NZ drinking laws were really tight – the legal age was 20, I was 21 – but I looked like a girl so I got hassled every time. Bars/Pubs etc were filled with big violent adults. In my mind, I’d kindof worked out this idea that a gig started when there were enough people in the audience to make it worth doing.
No one was there yet – there were about 6 people in the audience. Everyone laughed.
I did the gig… I packed the my stuff into the car… left the venue.
I left the band, I left Wellington, I left New Zealand.
