Flowers For Agatha
Inspired in part by the efforts of my dear friend Mr Peter Darnborough: I started to learn how to play the drums in September 1979. Pete, had a drum kit and was already playing gigs at parties around Horsforth. At one such party at the nearby Scotland Lane Estate, i got horribly drunk, staggered home and threw up everywhere. My dad promptly called up Pete to chastise him for my behaviour; something we still laugh about now. I guess my parents clocked him as a bad influence and they were right in a way.
At the time we were both listening to a lot of Rush, Black Sabbath, Led Zep', Thin Lizzy and other hard/prog rock groups at the time.
After a year or two of goofing around on my chrome Tama Swing Star kit in my bedroom, I decided it was time to join a band. Sometime in 1982 i answered an ad' placed on the notice board at Jumbo Records in Leeds.
I met the singer Jon shortly afterwards. He described himself as an anarchist and was studying politics at Liverpool University. I had never met an anarchist before and i was intrigued. Jon instructed me to stop listening to Rush because of their admiration of Ayn Rand, who was a fascist. Jon then made me a cassette sampler of Joy Division, The Cure, The Monochrome Set and Echo and The Bunnymen. This cassette became my template for the musical journey i was about to go on with Jon.
I was in the sixth form studying A levels and we had just read a short story about a dying man called Flowers For Algernon. I adapted the title to name the band Flowers For Agatha. I was starting to sneak out to The Warehouse and The Phonographique in Leeds and something else was happening in the city: Goth.
My first ever gig was at The Packhorse on the edge of Hyde Park. I was nervous as hell, more so when my parents showed up to 'cheer me on'. A lovely show of support in retrospect, but at the time i was horrified that my mum turned up in a fox fur jacket.
The show was a blur of nerves, sweat and Tetleys Bitter, lots of dropped sticks,hairspray and unnecessary fills. I was hooked.
No one in the band could play at all. Paul the bassist and Mick the guitarist were real one string wonders, and my mother would often describe Jon's voice as like a cow in some sort of labor pain. I would practice and rehearse Flowers for Agatha in my bedroom at the bottom of Horsforth School Drive. So it wasn't long before everyone at school knew i was in a band. This was met with ridicule and curiosity in equal measure. When Mick left, we found a replacement in Rab, a Scot living in Bramley: A more competant guitarist with some interesting ideas about stage craft. My mother still complains about how he dragged dog shit all the way up to my bedroom from his giant sized high tops one afternoon.
We recorded demos at Lion Studios with Tony Bonner and Len Liggins at the controls in '82 and '83. I think i had just bought a pair of Roto-Toms before the first session. You can hear me trying to put them in at every opportunity on our first offerings. Thankfully the drumming and overall fidelity improved a bit by the second stint. By then we were playing around Leeds and had become a bit of a fixture on the alternative scene.
Somewhere along the line i started to see the limitations of the group and lost interest. I was superceded by a bunch of kids i went to school with coincidentally enough and another kid from the posh school who wound up writing the popular tv comedy 'The League Of Gentlemen'. They signed to Cherry Red and opened for the Cult, but i had had my moment playing on the lager and black soaked carpet on the floor at Le Phonographique.
I went to University in London with a fire in my belly for playing music, thanks to Flowers For Agatha.