On the road with The Screenbeats

Part II 

In my last post, I reminisced about The Artist Formerly Known As The Screenbeats / The Shake / The Immediate and shared a link to the newly-re-uploaded video for ‘Super 8’ which was shot in South Wales back in 2008.  In part II below, I’ll expand a little bit more on some of the most memorable tales from life in the band…

Unsurprisingly, it’s either the very good or the very bad stories that stand out in the memory.

The ‘not ideal’ 

Who could forget the time that we played Brixton Jamm in summer 2006 to a crowd comprising of only the sound man?  That’s right; no paying customers – even the bar staff had called it a night and gone home.  The promoter had booked a line-up consisting purely of bands from out of town (a band even travelled down from Northumberland for the gig) and we were due to play last at 10pm, by which point all of the other groups (who also had also brought no fans) had left.  We played Jamm twice and luckily the second time was a lot busier.  There was also the heavy snow blizzard we had to endure on the way back from a gig in Kingston in 2009.  Roger’s steady driving prowess (and perhaps the Saint Christopher necklace that he decided to wear for luck) got us home in one piece though – even though the journey took several hours longer than usual.  

At Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff in 2009, my cherished Gibson ES-335 guitar fell over whilst in its case during soundcheck and I was distraught to open it to find the neck had snapped clean off.  I was a bit subdued during the gig but the guitar was able to eventually be repaired so all ended well (it was actually my second guitar to have been badly damaged after one of Newbury Corn Exchange’s technicians knocked my white Les Paul off its stand before a gig in 2004).  The less said about another show at Cardiff University in 2007 where our sticksman at the time got “lost” on his way to the venue and never arrived, the better.  We soldiered on drummer-less as a three-piece – with the occasional member of the audience coming up to try and improvise along to our songs.  Not our finest moment. 

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The red Gibson 335 that got badly damaged repaired and in action at a gig in Newbury in 2009 (photo: James Thorogood) and the
“one where the drummer didn’t show up” – Cardiff University CF10 venue, 23rd November 2007 (photo: Emily Trahair).

Bizarrely, we agreed to play a gig in Chippenham, of all places in August 2006.  We were playing for a local ‘face’ around town known as ‘DJ Delboy’ (no, I’m not making this up) who had put on a night of bands loosely inspired by the 1960s and mod culture at a venue called Fizz Bar.  At the time, I was slightly prone to anxiety and over-thinking things – possibly as a result of my high caffeine intake (until the age of 21 I would drink a bottle of Coca Cola a day until I went cold turkey in 2008 – I rarely touch the stuff these days).  Onstage I became convinced that I was desperate for the loo and about to wet myself in front of the assembled audience.  Midway through our final song ‘Loyal Union’, I flung off my guitar, rested it against my floor monitor and sprinted to the bathroom upstairs (where it turned out that I didn’t even need to go after all), before returning to finish the song the guys had continued playing in my absence.  Afterwards, the rest of the band weren’t best pleased with my decision to bolt upstairs mid-song and things were a little tense as we loaded our equipment into Rog’s car.  However, the mood was soon lifted and we started laughing about it after an incident involving an underwhelming post-gig chow mein takeaway, an open car window and Chippenham High Street.

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The notorious Chippenham Fizz Bar gig (the Union Jack flag on the guitar amp was NOT ours), August 2005 (photo: DJ Delboy). Onstage at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff with Haydn drumming. May 2007 (photo: Ed Salter)

It wasn’t our only incident involving an open car window…

Our hometown Newbury had been a Liberal Democrat stronghold for 12 years since 1993; and the incumbent local MP was the late David Rendel.  However, in 2005 he lost his seat in parliament to Richard Benyon, the Conservative candidate.  On our way to a London gig sometime in 2005/6, we spotted Benyon being interviewed by a camera crew as we drove past Newbury Market Square in Roger’s Rover 400.  It only felt right that we should of course, wind down our windows and shout some words of disapproval at him as we drove past.  We didn’t hang around to see what the reaction would be.  I actually met Benyon years later whilst I working for the Newbury Spring Festival in 2009. He had hosted a classical recital at his stately home and country estate Englefield House and even though I don’t agree with his views, he was pleasant enough. 

Another unfortunate car window-related incident but this time involving a bout of food poisoning, vomit and the famous Harrods department store was en route to a gig in Clerkenwell in July 2007.  We had optimistically booked ourselves to play two gigs in one day.  The first was at the TNT Festival in Victoria Park in Newbury; an all-day event headlined by Columbia Records signing GoodBooks and compered by the irrepressibly upbeat ‘Smiley’ Dave Browne.  After our early afternoon slot at the festival we then drove to London for our second show of the day at The Betsey Trotwood; a grand Victorian pub on the Farringdon Road that had a great little cellar venue (both The Magic Numbers and Keane had been spotted after playing shows there).  We also liked it because it felt packed, even if only 20 people were there. 

Our first gig of the day on 28th July 2007 – at TNT Festival, Newbury (pre-vomit).

It was as we made our way through West London and the upmarket areas of South Kensington and Knightsbridge that I began to feel unwell and very nauseous.  I asked Rog to stop the car in South Ken, lay down on the pavement briefly and then began to feel momentarily better and we continued with our journey.  However, it was as we were driving past Harrods, London’s premiere luxury goods emporium that I couldn’t stop it; I hastily wound down the right-side rear passenger window and was violently sick onto the busy A4 with the oncoming traffic behind us.  This continued to happen every 10 minutes or so until we finally reached the venue.  I spent all of the evening lying in one of the venue’s darkened alcoves (apart from the occasional visit to the bathroom to heave up whatever was left in my stomach), unable to keep any liquid down whatsoever.  However, I somehow managed to find the energy from somewhere to do the gig and we actually played pretty well.  As luck would have it, the entire gig was filmed too (why was it never the best gigs?). 

The Screenbeats – ‘Before Before’ – live at The Betsey Trotwood, Clerkenwell. 28th July 2007

We wrote ‘Before Before’ in 2004 and changed the chorus at some stage in 2005/6. We would later drop it from our live set in 2008/9 but it contained a nice vocal melody and some soulful chord changes.

We will never know exactly what strain of food poisoning I had that day and admittedly I had been out the night before to the closing party of Southampton’s alternative nightclub Nexus (towards the end of the night bar staff had stopped charging for drinks and everything had to go), but I had felt fine at the TNT Festival gig during the day so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a hangover.  Also, on the Betsey Trotwood line-up with us that day were The Lucky Strikes, a band from Southend.  They were good lads, helped us with our equipment with me incapacitated and we ended up playing a few gigs with them over the next couple of years.  They’re still together today although have taken a more rootsy / Americana direction in recent years.  They’re decent – check them out here.  

Then there was Romford, Essex in April 2005.  We had been contacted through MySpace (the way most bands booked their shows at the time) by a promoter who had heard our music, claimed to be a “big fan” and wanted us to headline a show at a venue called Pacific Edge.  We had reservations about the merit of playing a gig in Romford and the venue’s name did it no favours but he assured us that it would be busy, we’d be paid £300, would have a rider of complimentary food and drink and our own dressing room. 

When we arrived, it was nothing of the sort and we found out we would be playing the small upstairs room of a town centre nightclub that had no stage other than a DJ booth (we had to set up our amps on the floor).  To add insult to injury, soundcheck was at 3pm and our stage time was 10.30pm.  The crowd was sparse, the PA system not loud enough for Faye’s vocals to be heard and the promoter paid us a paltry £20 towards petrol costs.  Our night in Romford finished with all four of us shouting at the promoter (we were all generally pretty mild-mannered, most of the time) as he tried to justify his decision to reduce our fee by more than 90 percent.  I ended up leaving one of my overdrive effects pedals at the venue too but to give the promoter his dues, he did eventually post it back to me – but only after my Dad had phoned him pretending to be our ‘manager’ (I was only 17 at the time so it’s perhaps less pathetic than it sounds). 

Our eventful evening in Romford. 10th April 2005.

It wasn’t all bad at Romford though.  Earlier that day some genuine local ‘fans’ had contacted us by email saying they were coming to the gig and asked if we could put them on the guestlist.  The promoter was having none of it so drummer Joost and I met them outside the venue instead and helped the two lads to climb over the wall in the garden at the rear of the building so they got in for free after all.  It was the closest we ever got to The Clash letting their fans in through an open dressing room window before their gig at the Edinburgh Odeon!

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The Clash’s Joe Strummer helps fans get backstage through an open dressing room window. Edinburgh Odeon Theatre. January 1980.

Joost and I crashed on his sister’s floor in Leytonstone the night of the Romford show and after initially being too wound up to sleep after the heated altercation with the promoter, we got up bright and early the next day and headed to Soho with the aim of dropping off our demo CD and press pack to as many music companies in the area as possible.  We found Heavenly Recordings’ then-HQ on above Ronnie Scott’s and opposite Bar Italia on Frith Street, dropped off our demo but sadly there was no response on the buzzer from Jeff Barrett, Robin Turner and co – at least we tried.

NB: Looking back, it’s quite amazing the chutzpah we had in our late-teens and early-20s – perhaps lacking the self-awareness and social etiquette you pick up as you get older.  Edith Bowman, Steve Lamacq, Zane Lowe, Huw Stephens and various members of The Cooper Temple Clause, Ocean Colour Scene and Super Furry Animals; these were all people that we would bound up to at gigs and festivals, thrust a demo CD into their hand, ask if they would mind giving it a listen and urge them to get in contact if they liked what they heard.

The Pleasure Unit; Bethnal Green’s finest

We then headed East to Bethnal Green where we were playing a show later that evening at The Pleasure Unit at 359 Bethnal Green Road.  Apart from some certain venues in our hometown of Newbury, The Pleasure Unit became a second home for us over the years and musically and aesthetically it felt like a venue very much in-keeping with our identity as a band.  Stepping into the venue for the first time was like going back to the ‘60s; kitsch aged wallpaper, projected light shows and some walls painted cream whilst the others were a lurid purple.  Despite its retro stylings, the venue was a favoured haunt of Pete Doherty, Art Brut, The Paddingtons, Special Needs and a lot of the other current crop of post-Strokes-era bands coming out of London at the time.  Although the venue was downstairs, there was a dressing room-of-sorts up a rickety staircase on the next floor, where we would keep our equipment when we weren’t playing.  Before a gig in 2005, we were surprised to bump into Libertines bassist John Hassall and his band Yeti who were also rehearsing in the building.  More about Yeti and their marvellous and underrated single ‘Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder’ in a future post. 

The heyday of The Pleasure Unit, Bethnal Green Road. Pure Reason Revolution, Thee Unstrung (joined by Dominic Masters from The Others) and Pete Doherty with Dot Allison (photos: Andrew Kendall) – all in 2004. Also, The Actionettes dance troupe and some shots of the venue’s distinctive interior.

The quality of the acts at The Pleasure Unit was usually pretty high (from memory, two of the best bands we played with were the brilliant Young Soul Rebels from Brighton who toured with The Ordinary Boys and The Lost Revue who had a minor indie hit with ‘The Devil Hit A Hi-Hat Riding’) and we got to know the two main promoters ‘Nigerian Nick’ and ‘Smart Phil’ and even earned a slot supporting the then-buzz band Thee Unstrung who were briefly signed to former Creation Records boss Alan McGee’s Poptones label and fresh from supporting The Libertines on tour.  I would bump into Phil (whose feather cut made him a dead ringer for Roger actually) years later during my leaving do for the London PR agency Mischief that I was working for at the time – by chance he was DJing at the underground dive club The Bar on Hanway Street (now sadly gone and replaced by a karaoke bar)  He’s a nice bloke and a complete music aficionado.  The Pleasure Unit closed a long time ago now and 359 Bethnal Green is now the trendy Star of Bethnal Green pub. 

Happy days

A short interview with us and a clip of ‘Hanging On’ filmed at the 229 Club, Great Portland Street by Caffy St Luce. 4th March 2010.

For every Romford or Leicester Square though there were 10 shows that went well and where we actually received a decent reaction from the audience.  It was always a pleasure playing for Caffy St Luce and Jean ‘Genie’ Graham, whether it was down in New Cross at Goldsmiths University, The Walpole, New Cross Inn or the unique Montague Arms, or in later years at 229 Club on Great Portland Street.  Simon Owens always made sure we were well-looked after and fairly-paid at our busy hometown gigs at the Newbury Tap & Spile – the audience sometimes even bizarrely included our former teachers.  Neil Jones got us some great gigs in Cardiff, including a rather surreal night playing a Primal Scream aftershow party at Chris Sullivan’s (of WAG Club fame) newly-opened venue Tabu on Westgate Street – we went onstage at 1am just as the ‘Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, Martin Duffy et al were arriving.  The Hope & Anchor in Islington and Camden Dublin Castle were both well-run, small grassroots venues where you also felt a sense of history; the former being the location of not only Joy Division’s but also U2’s first London shows and the latter venue will be forever closely associated with local heroes Madness, Blur and Amy Winehouse.  There is a great 10 minute documentary about it here.

Clockwise (from top left); 1.) Onstage at The Dublin Castle, August 2007. 2.) The flyer for one of Caffy St Luce’s Art Beat shows, 2010. 3-4.) Live at The Hope & Anchor, Islington 2008 (photo: Hersh Tegala). 5.) One of the many shows we played at the Tap & Spile, Newbury. September 2007 (photo: Scott Burgess).

It was sat on the floor of the tiny ‘dressing room’ / equipment cupboard at the Dublin Castle in 2007 that by complete chance I became reacquainted with Dan Fatel (or perhaps ‘Fate-l’ is more apt).  Dan was the frontman of Renton, a North London post-punk band that I booked to headline a charity fundraiser concert at my school St. Bart’s in Newbury on 2^nd July 2004.  Significantly, it was Joost and I’s first-ever show as members of the revamped The Immediate.  I had also booked The Junglists who would go onto become a big name on the Newbury scene and would even support The Mystery Jets.  A review of the show that appeared in the Newbury Weekly News still exists on the R*E*P*E*A*T Fanzine website – it makes for nostalgic reading.  After the show, my pals Jason, Mike and I went to a party and would then spend the night trying to sleep in a pup-tent that we had cheaply bought from Argos and then stashed for safe-keeping in a bush on our school’s athletics field, Brown’s Meadow.  Despite it being July, it was still rather cold at 4am so we returned to the school as soon as it opened on Saturday morning and actually slept for a couple of hours on the Luker Hall stage, with the fire curtain closed, obscuring us from view.

Dan and his band Renton taken just before their charity show at St. Bart’s Newbury, 2nd July 2004 (photo: Newbury Weekly News). Two of our first promo shots from around a similar time.

Dan and I would keep in touch after our Dublin Castle encounter and he was in a number of bands after Renton split up including Fatels, No Picasso and then CuT.  CuT were managed by former Food Records boss and Blur impresario Andy Ross and after seeing them live a couple of times I chose them to feature in the new point-of-sale advertising campaign for Jack Rocks for 2014/15 – the music initiative from Jack Daniel’s, who was I was working for at the time.  It was great to get reacquainted with Dan some 11 years after that first gig in Newbury and CuT went onto to play raucous Jack Rocks shows for us at both The Macbeth in Hoxton and The Isle of Wight Festival 2015.  Dan’s a top bloke and is now making music as REALS. 

Some 11 years later and CuT play the Jack Rocks Stage for us at The Isle of Wight Festival 2015 (photo: Will Ireland).

Supporting The Arctic Monkeys’ best mates at The Charlotte, Leicester

Leicester was another city where we strangely played a number of shows; at The Charlotte (R.I.P.), The Attik (R.I.P.) and the ace Firebug venue (still open – hurrah!) where we supported twee-pop starlets Pocketbooks in 2010.  The Charlotte was one of the oldest, well-trodden and most famous independent ‘toilet circuit’ venues in the country when we played there in July 2005 supporting Milburn from Sheffield.  

Milburn were good friends (and two of the members actually cousins of bassist Nick O’Malley) with the Arctic Monkeys and had apparently “taught them how to play their instruments”.  Both bands were on the ascendancy at the time (Milburn had been signed to Universal Music Group imprint Mercury Records), yet it was the Arctic Monkeys who went stratospheric one year later, although it quite easily could have been Milburn instead.  They had some great tunes like ‘Send In The Boys’ and ‘Cheshire Cat Smile’ – both of which dented the UK Top 40, charting at numbers 22 and 32 respectively and their Dave Eringa-produced debut album Well Well Well went in at number 32 and featured an appearance from none other than Billy Bragg.

Onstage at the Leicester Charlotte, July 2005. Milburn took to the stage just after us.

That gig was notable for a number of reasons; The Charlotte was the first ever venue we played where they had an actual full-size bath in the upstairs dressing room.  Neal, an old primary school friend still living in Leicester came to the gig with some friends – the first time I had seen him in over 10 years.  An emerging music photographer called Ollie Millington came to the gig and took some shots of us; Ollie is today a well-established snapper and we still keep in touch.  We also encountered the venue’s notorious soundman Feedback Phil.  Phil was in his 60s, had a ponytail, arrived at the venue by bicycle and curtly barked orders at us from behind his sound desk; a tactic I think was designed to crush any oversized egos that visiting bands might have brought along with them.  Milburn were a nice bunch of lads too.  They let us share their backline equipment and midway through their set frontman Joe Carnall even paused between songs to hand an errant earring back to Faye after it must have been fallen out during our performance.

Milburn disbanded in 2008 but reunited in 2016 to a rapturous reaction from fans including several arena shows and four sold out nights at the O2 Academy Sheffield. Here’s footage of them playing to the sort of crowd they deserved back in the day; to 7,500 fans at the Don Valley Bowl, Sheffield in 2017 (I think their influence on the ‘Monkeys has finally been recognised). The full concert is available here.

In the third and final post about The Screenbeats I’ll look back at what happened when we played the legendary garage-rock club Dirty Water in 2005 – with a band that would go on to form a supergroup with Jack White just a few months later.  There’ll also be some never-seen-before videos from one of our final shows at the Montpellier Rockstore, December 2010.

Some press coverage on BBC Berkshire from 2005.