While tidying up I unearthed this band related artefact.
Caustic Soup on tour.
Surely this amount of gigs wasn't sustainable given the number of venues within relatively easy reach of our home base. Distance was no object, as long as it took less than an hour to get there and we could get our PA back in time for midnight, otherwise it would turn into a pumpkin sized excess charge. I certainly don't remember there being an average of four gigs per month. Rock and roll excess huh?
My memory may not be accurate, perhaps we supported Guns N' Roses at some point. Although given the size of Morrisey's Riverside, a regular venue for us, I doubt it would have had room for the provisions for their legendary consumption, or indeed Duff McKagan's exploding pancreas. No, we wouldn't have supported them, there would have ended up being an altercation with Axl Rose caused by him being an arse.
As for the Slug and Fiddle (proprietor Herbie Armstrong) gig on Thursday 17 April being switched to the Foundry and Firkin, I have no idea, maybe we never played the Slug. We did at some point play The Boardwalk, or Mucky Duck as it should properly be known, the other one of Herbie Armstrong's pubs, a stage graced by many bands people had actually heard of.
I'm quite prepared to extrapolate from this and believe we played around 50 gigs per year for five years if it adds to the mythology. A mythology which included us being the first band to play an open air festival on The Ponderosa in Sheffield since Free, which is probably, nearly true - it was definitely the easiest gig for me to get to, I just took the lift down from my flat with my guitar and walked to the stage.
I also found copies of the setlist, and while many songs were easy to recollect I struggled to associate some of the titles with any tune at all - something we had occasionally been accused of, however being an avant-garde outfit this didn't perturb us.
The unknown year? My skills of Googling tell me that Friday 18 April was in 1997. Less than a fortnight after the final gig listed here we had a Labour government, heady days where people appeared to know what they were doing and not just blundering about like a bunch of privileged, tousle-haired twats.
Exactly the sorts of things that will change your life.
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