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…and whole legions of George Orwell fans are keeping The Aspidistra Flying somewhere on the road to Wigan Pier. I’m playing guitar in a band called The Others. We’re great! We scare other bands! We even scare other bands audiences!
Oh yes, we’re great…so great that when, on 1st January 1985 the rest of the group announce that they are leaving me (“Happy New Year, er, we’ve just got something to tell you…”) I’m actually pretty much devastated. The Bastards! And they told me in a pub so it cost me a fortune.
So what do I do now? Well it feels like the whole world is listening to Wham! and telling me how great they are, whereas I’m listening to The Redskins, Billy Bragg, The Prisoners, Action Pact, The (Newtown) Neurotics, - even The Smiths sound a bit ordinary to me next to that lot. I’m still playing my old 60’s faves and the punk days have not been forgotten either so I’m not short of ideas. But first I need someone to write with.
Looking through the small ads in Sounds mag one day I saw an advert from someone called Malcolm; he says he’s a singer in the Slough area and is looking for a band. One quick phone call and a meeting is arranged.
Meanwhile I’ve had a call from Mick Francis who had heard that The Others were no more and wondered what my plans were. I’d met Mick when we’d gigged with In The Dark, another local band that were always a bit lightweight for me, though he’d always impressed behind the kit. I recall that we had spoke at great length about Tom Robinson and Joe Jackson who we were both big fans of…if only he’d stopped going on about Queeeen, oh well, I guess you can’t have everything.
To be honest I can’t recall exactly what happened next, but the end result was that Mick, Malcolm and myself found ourselves with a gig at Cranford Community centre on March 22nd supporting Mick’s brother’s band ‘My Finest Hour’ (and yes, they were easily as bad as their name). With no songs and no bass player we would have to move fast.
Gary Stallwood was (and indeed still is) an old friend of mine, a multi-instrumentalist who had drummed in The Others for a while. He came in on bass, a temporary substitute as he was emigrating to the USA where he still lives. (I should say that he was going anyway- we weren’t that bad). We were impulsively named The Price although we were very nearly called The Shops or incredulously, The French (because everybody hates….etc). and then set about getting some songs together. Malcolm already had an attempt at ‘The Man With The Smile’, which I helped him finish. We wrote ‘Vodka Cola’ and ‘Déjà vu’ (later rewritten as ‘The Cover Up’) from scratch and Malc & I reworked an old Others song called Flyboy into Fight.
We also threw together a version of the stones’ Paint it Black – the first song mentioned at rehearsal that we all knew, which gave us a sub 20 minute, 5 song set which we played to the bemusement and indifference from the ‘My Finest Hour’ audience and cheery applause from the mates we had managed to drag along to the gig.
Encouraged by this somewhat chaotic start to our (ahem!) career we then blagged a gig at The Clarendon in Hammersmith supporting The Clinch, local mates of mine. I think we wrote ‘What Can I Say’ and ‘Out In The Open’ for this one – there is a tape of the show somewhere that I must dig out. I recall the band being much more together for this show- but with that, Gary was gone.
Never one to miss an opportunity for a bad gag, I could now say that we went out looking for a bassist called Gary to make it easier for us to remember his name, but actually Gary Dibley was an excellent player and a fine chap to boot. His first gig was at Brunel University in Uxbridge supporting Action Pact and Porky the Poet (now better known by his real name of Phill Jupitas) that he played with chord sheets placed strategically about the stage.
We played Brunel again a few weeks later supporting The Big Boys (featuring ex Ruts guitarist Paul Fox) and The Immediate (whose bass player Pete Tobit played with us at our 2005 reunion at The Rayners)
Fanzines were a very important part of the independent music scene at the time. Locally Andy Peart’s ‘So What’ was an early enthusiastic supporter of the band, as was ‘A Pack of Lies’ written by Harlow Observer sports reporter Steve Lamacq. He asked us to contribute a track to a flexi disc (remember them?) to be given away free with ‘Lies’ so we recorded The Man With The Smile- which was his favourite song of ours- at PBS studio in Cowley. It came out towards the end of the year – I remember we were playing Brunel (again!) on the night Steve bought them along for the first time and DJ/promoter Andy Stubbs played it over the PA.
- we’d arrived!
More gigs followed in 86, which included the Fulham Greyhound with Paul Fox’s Choir Militia. Also around this time my old mate and guitar teacher Tony McMahon recorded our whole repertoire on his 4-track recorder at a rehearsal room documenting the Dibley era of the band pretty well.
The future of the band was looking good when …
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