Gig Memories 1981 (Part 1)

The band spent nearly half of its lifetime, from the summer of 1978 to the summer of 1983, in gig-less preparation. In 1981 the real active life of the band began. Getting the hang of booking gigs, band promotion, and all that, in a hectic five weeks from 3rd February to 10th March, we had lined up for ourselves nine engagements. Nine gigs in five weeks may not seem a lot for most bands. But then again, unlike most bands, Sample and Hold were never in the business of just going through the motions. A gig for us was no small thing. Each gig contained all the highs and lows of life. We visited the peeks of elation and pits of demoralisation. Emotional exhaustion was a familiar condition, not to mention bodily ruin. And, as a rule, the amount of drink taken was nothing sane. 

The first of these gigs was in the Catholic Chaplaincy at Queen’s. It was a sort of party-and-disco-and-three-bands affair. The running order for the evening was: disco; Sample and Hold; Big Self; The Lids; disco. Geoff, singer and mainstay of The Lids supplied the P.A. The Lids were a great cover band, and during their sound check I couldn’t resist jumping up and joining in. They were playing Let’s Dance and it was the perfect song for a Vox Continental.

The evening’s entertainment got under way with a Terri Hooly disco for an hour or so. Terri had an unusual line in DJ patter. By way of a catch phrase he would shout into the mic, “sure whaddy I know.” Terri, is an important figure in the history of the music scene in Belfast (or so he tells us).

The rest of the evening did not go as planned. After Mr Hooly’s hour of disco and self-deprecation, Big Self got up. I think the boys in Big Self just wanted to get the thing over and done with so that they could get off home. In my opinion Big Self were the best band around. They wrote great songs with a Clashesque blend of punk and reggae, with a special sound all their own.

As we prepared to get up and do our thing, the second change to the evening’s agenda occurred. A band called The Trial appeared from nowhere and jumped onto the stage in front of us. Later, I found out that it was Terri Hooly who had spotted the guys from The Trial standing at the bar, and it was he who had dragged them into the proceedings. I had nothing against the band, but I thought it was a bit of a liberty on Terri’s part. But then Terri is not known for his tact or sensitivity. 

Having been set up and ready to go since 7.15 p.m., we finally stepped on to the stage at nearly midnight. This was a long time to maintain our performers’ adrenalin/alcohol equilibrium. 

The singer was experimenting with a shirt-and-tie-and-blazer image, which didn’t really get off the ground. Still, it was more of an effort than anyone else was putting in. With original songs mixed in among the covers, our basic set for this and the next lot of gigs ran like this:

The fabulous Big Self

Inside—original

Furniture Music—Bill Nelson

Advert—original

Bye Bye Love—The Cars

Can’t Explain—The Who

Watching the Detectives—Elvis Costello

Moving in Stereo—The Cars

Working for the Yankee Dollar—The Skids

Drowning—original

Whatever Happened To…?—original

What Goes On—The Velvet Underground

Ghosts Of Princes in Towers—Rich Kids

Dirty Water—Nine Below Zero

Half way through our performance a spokesman for The Lids walked up, waved his watch in my face, and told us to, “hurry up and get off”. They might have been a bit more diplomatic about it but it was understandable; it was a Tuesday night in Belfast not Friday in New Orleans, and The Lids naturally enough wanted to get on before it got any later and the punters started to drift off home. We acted like gentlemen, left out our last two numbers, and “got off”.

Then The Lids went on, cranked up all the volume knobs and blew a fuse (not figuratively, literally, blew a fuse), bringing everything to a silent standstill for five minutes. I felt sorry for Geoff. It was late. Everyone else had been using his gear all night, and now it was letting him down. The Bar was by now closed and the management in the Chaplaincy seized their opportunity. The house lights went up and out rang the customary bouncer’s cry, “right folks, drink up and get out”. The Lids did their best to soldier on, and by the time the power came back their bass player had had enough and buggered off home.

Some of our fellow musicians in the Chaplaincy that night were kind enough to mention that they liked our music. However a few of the punters did point out that we “weren’t loud enough”. There was perhaps a reason for this. It is a common enough practice for head-line bands, being in control of the mixing desk, to put the scud on support bands by ensuring that they aren’t as loud as they themselves will be. Consequently, the increase in volume that accompanies the entrance of the ‘professional’ main act makes them sound really confident and exciting in comparison with the seemingly lack-lustre ‘amateur’ support band. Sometimes it’s almost as if there is a secret button somewhere on the mixing desk which makes everything sound crap while the support band is playing: ‘a scud button’, if you will. The scudding strategy works every time because punters, on the whole, continue, as ever, to miss-hear low volume and poor sound quality as ‘bad music’ and ‘bad musicianship’. (You can’t separate the art from the wires.) 

Until now, innocents that we were, we hadn’t imagined our fellow musicians capable of such cynicism. I don’t want to accuse The Lids unfairly here, but if indeed our hosts did play such an unscrupulous trick on us, then at least on this particular occasion, happily, the trick seems to have backfired.

* * *

Next, we returned to Spuds in Portstewart, but once again it was Friday, the wrong night, and there were even fewer people there than the first time. As we arrived, our sixth-former fan from our previous visit was there to greet us. The guy had changed somewhat since our first meeting a few months earlier. He had, in fact, changed more than somewhat. His hair was bleached blonde and he was in full make-up. His eyebrows had gone and he had new ones painted on a bit higher up. More power to him, I thought: this was Portstewart for God’s sake, he wasn’t exactly making life easy for himself.

Some pencil work

Our blossoming New Romantic friend had brought his own blossoming New Romantic band along with him, and he enquired keenly if we would be prepared to let them go on before us for an impromptu support slot. He didn’t look as though he had considered the contingency that we might refuse his request, so, graciously, we obliged.

His band were very young indeed and, sadly, it has to be said that their music was a shambles. The keyboardist was astoundingly out of tune. Even as he was setting it up it had been clear that he was not at ease with his technology. He needed help to find the output socket on his drum machine and I stepped in when I couldn’t bear to watch any more. The bass player stood off-stage with his back to the audience throughout the performance. Not for moody effect, as one might have supposed, but rather because he was petrified, and he had opted for the ostrich approach. Their music wasn’t good, but it didn’t really matter because the audience in Spuds that night was only eighteen strong, and evidently they were all school chums of our impromptu support band.

It was with some reluctance that we climbed up onto the stage in front of the school-outing-type audience, who had come along to hear ‘the other band’. As we ploughed our way through our set, our performance was decidedly strained and ragged. This gig marked a general change of mood and intent within the band. No longer content with merely getting a chance to play, our mannish young egos henceforth would required a ‘good gig’, in a ‘good venue’, with a ‘good audience’. This Spuds gig was simply unsatisfactory.

Missing

The right amount of the right type of resentment can work well at times, giving some bands an attractive edginess. This was part of the mechanics of the Punk phenomenon, and certainly, by the time we got to the last two songs of the night, our playing was so raucous that we had indeed become Punk-like. However, since we were never meant to be a punk band, our self-destructively haywire performance had little to commend it. For us, the undercurrent of self-important drunken resentment was merely the natural enemy of proficiency. In Spuds that night we set a precedent in un-professionalism. We played Working for the Yankee Dollar so fast that we just about held it together. So frantic was our rendition that the guitarist had to stop playing in the middle of it for a rest. During the last song of the night the bass player’s instrument fell apart, and, to cap everything off, I mislaid my favourite blue jumper. 

We got back to Belfast in the wee small hours of the morning, bitter, and weary from the drink. As we arrived at the student house in Stranmillis Street where the singer and bass player lived, we trouped in for a cup of tea and a band meeting. There followed a tense and protracted discussion that went on for about three hours, and which including a good deal of recrimination and character assassination.

* * *

Tuesday 10th February 1981 found us again in front of the students in The Speakeasy. Big Self were the main act. Sample and Hold were in the middle, and the first act up were called The Synthetic Fibres. There was a lot of gear to get on and off stage with a degree of efficiency which doesn’t sit well in an amateurish rock ‘n’ roll setting. By the time Big Self had had their sound check, there was only a natter of minutes for  me  to organise my megalomaniacal pile of keyboards before the first band were due to play. It was pretty hard to look cool, as I jumped around the stage with my boxes and wires, I must have looked as I felt; just like some mad scientist’s monkey-man-assistant.

The Synthetic Fibres did their bit. They were a bunch of trendy young guys, with their guitars up round their chests, baggy trousers, and their long fringes hanging in their faces. After they had finished their fairly tuneless jangling, the we went on and played a lot better than at our previous gig. However, by no means, did we play well. For, to play well it is helpful for a band to be having fun, and it was hard to have fun in the Student’s Union.

Too many decibels  

On top of the artistic hurdles, I had some technical problems as well. Unfortunately I was not yet au fait with some of my recently aqcuired equipment, and the two seventy-five watt amps that were built into my mixer cut out a few times, an act of self preservation on their part, before I noticed the meters were well into the red. I was, quite simply, far too loud. Consequently, the guitarist had to turn up his amp all the way to try and match me, decibel for outrageous decibel. This of course was the wrong way to go about things. Really one is supposed to let the P.A. system do all the work, while the amplification on stage is really just there to give one the right sort of feel or something. Throughout the lifetime of Sample and Hold, neither the guitarist nor myself ever did fully grasp of the concept of plugging into the P.A. and letting it take the strain. It took me many years to realise that it was not a good plan to try to blow the punters out of the room with my own private noise weapon, especially not while the speakers of said noise weapon are perched up on a table and situated right beside my own poor head. 

Happily, the night finished on a high. Big Self got up to do their stuff and they swept us all off our feet. They were so good in fact that even I myself had to have a bop. I danced drunkenly to their first few songs, at which point the glands in my neck got swollen and I had to sit down.

* * *

Our next gig, on Thursday 19th February 1981, was in the famous Pound Music Club just off Oxford Street. This was a great night. We were to play The Pound five times in all, and these were some of our best nights. I was thrilled about getting to perform on such hallowed ground, but I played it cool of course.

Nice horse

Let me just say a few words about The Pound. It was quite simply one of the grottiest holes you could imagine. It smelt bad and so did its clientele. It also happened to be the best music spot in town. It was a common assumption that The Pound was named thus because it cost a pound to get in. This was not the case. The Pound was called The Pound because it was built originally as the pound for the stray horses of Belfast. It was all very appropriate really. It had been designed with animals in mind, and right enough here it was, frequented, by and large, by animals.

Arriving in the early evening to start setting up, it was odd to be in The Pound, and to be relatively sober at the same time. It was scary too; scary to actually see the place for once. There were no windows, and there was only one narrow exit. The structure of the building itself wasn’t really very safe. Its frame was made from old railway tracks, rather than proper ‘I’ beams or the like. There was an extra half-floor from which you could look down on the band, but the rough concrete steps, which led up to this ‘mezzanine’, were each about a foot high; just right for horses, and funnily enough, if you were sufficiently drunk, these giant steps actually seemed to make a lot of sense. As I started to shift some tables and chairs around to make platforms for our P.A., I was surprised by the unusual rubbery texture of the furniture. Then I realised that everything in The Pound was coated with layer upon layer of beer, and various other spilt and discharged fluids that didn’t bare thinking about. The whole place was spongy with it. 

A cover from the day

Anyway, we got some drinks and things normalised a bit. The Pound seemed reasonable again. Then the audience arrived and the night’s music got underway. A band called Autostrad went on before us and they were very interesting in a jazz-funk sort of way. They had an English keyboard player who played a Hohner Clavinet through a wah-wah peddle. He was great, but the driving force behind Autostrad was their superbly proficient drummer. Roxy, as he was known, also wrote the lyrics for their songs, and he told me later that he got his ideas from reading Cosmopolitan.

When it was our turn, from the moment the we hit the stage, we were in our element. The audience were generous to us, and we were generous in return. We played our full set except for Moving in Stereo, which just seemed too understated for our exuberant mood. We played a storm. The singer put his foot through the stage, which was as rotten as everything else in the Pound, accept the music. A friend of mine from work, was at the gig for his first look at the band. Tim had been evolving into a party animal of an altogether more flamboyant strain than myself. Along with  the Portstewart guy, he was now in the vanguard of Northern Ireland New Romanticism. He changed his hair colour a lot. Once, when he dyed it three different colours in as many days, is hair had surrendered, and, as Tim himself observed, with some disgust, it was “like a bloody cobweb”. He looked great in The Pound, Mecca for retrograde rockers and biker desperadoes, resplendent and completely incongruous in his purple tail-coat, blue hair and orange blusher. 

It was much blacker that this

As we came to the end of our set, love was in the air, and an encore seemed appropriate. We resurrected I Need To Know, the Tom Petty number which we hadn’t played since the Devonshire Arms gigs, but first, I jumped off stage for toilet-break. While I was in there I had a conversation with a guy from the audience. The exchange went like this:

PUNTER: What do you call that band?; ME: Sample and Hold. 

PUNTER: What?; ME: we are called SAMPLE AND HOLD. 

PUNTER (surprised): Are you in the band?; ME: Yeah. 

PUNTER: It’s really good.; ME: It’s nice of you to say so.

This was not a remarkable conversation in itself, except that the punter apparently didn’t recognise me as one of the performers he had been watching for more than an hour. But then again, this may have been because our conversation took place in utter darkness. That this toilet was, as a rule, kept in pitch-black darkness was a mercy. At least those of us who frequented The Pound during these last few years of its existence have thus been spared any lasting and disturbing image of that hell hole that was the Pound toilet. Thankfully, we have only a gaping black space in our minds’ eye where the disgusting image would, otherwise, be lingering. Because of the darkness no-one was ever sure of the precise location of the urinal, assuming there was one. We lads just went in a couple of yards through the doorway and took care not to touch any walls. Then one simply aimed low into the darkness, hoping that no-one else was in there before you; equally mindful of the very real danger that somebody, perhaps drunker than oneself, might come up behind one, through the darkness, and piss all over one. The Pound was a great place.

After the show I congratulated the Autostrad guitarist on his band’s music. He said “Yeah, thanks, but it’s a pity it was all a bit zombie-like.” I think he felt somewhat deflated after seeing the glorious Sample and Hold leaping about on stage half crazed. And right enough, he had seen us at our best, for this was the first of the real Sample and Hold nights. Unlike the University venues, The Pound was real, and this was a real gig.

* * *

On Tuesday 24th February 1981, we made our third appearance in the Students’ Union Speakeasy, but now we were topping the bill. It was another three-band affair. A band called Etc. Etc. were first up. Paul Maxwell the singer and Howard Ingram on bass were to become our mates. Etc. Etc. were an interesting band. Keyboardist Steve Malaghan made a convincing argument for the use of echo with keyboards. A keyboard set-up of any kind was still a rare enough thing, and I was impressed. Paul and Howard offered a minimalist rendition of George Gershwin’s Stormy Whether. Trend merchants, these guys weren’t.

Next up were a band called Still, who, by contrast, certainly were trend merchants. As with the Synthetic Fibres, from our last visit to the Speakeasy, they were done up in the style of the day: guitars up around their necks and long self-conscious fringes hanging in their faces. Taking themselves awfully seriously, they were.

By the time we got onto the stage the adrenaline was flowing, and we played most of our fourteen-song set too damn fast, again. Evidently there was not enough alcohol in the mix. Elvis Costello’s Watching the Detectives, with a fun-filled chromatic extravaganza of a solo on my Vox Continental, was an exciting new addition to our set. It had gone down a storm on its first outing in the Pound, but this time, as we launched into Elvis Costello’s little classic, things didn’t go as planned. We played the intro as usual, but when the singer was supposed to start singing, he couldn’t remember the first line of the song. No big deal really, it happens to singers all the time. However it was a shock to the system for the guitarist and me. We were used to our singer following the format of a song as strictly as the rest of us. From our side of the fence, we didn’t generally hold to any of that band-follows-the-singer malarkey. 

The singer stood there sort of grooving along to the music with his head down, hiding the fact that he was racking his brain trying to conjure up the illusive Costello lyrics; and who could blame him for not remembering a line like, “Nice girl’s not one with a defect cellophane shrink rap so correct”. It was then that the guitarist made a regrettable  move. In his impatience he shuffled sideways and ‘nudged’ the singer on the leg with the point of his shoe. Coincidentally, just at that moment the singer remembered what he had so painfully been trying to recall, and sang out, “Nice girl’s not…” and so on. The effect was comical. It looked as though the guitarist had somehow ‘activated’ the singer. There was some laughter in the audience. 

Nudge nudge

The nudge incident was a rare exception. For the most part, we of the Sample and Hold fraternity shared a keen sense that we were ‘all in it together’. We took care of each other on stage within a sort of mutual support system; a system grounded in a common purpose, even if the purpose was often nothing grander than a panic-driven determination to get through to the end of a given song without complete band collapse.

Personally, I came to appreciate this aspect of gigging as one of the most enjoyable elements of the whole adventure. As I gained more experience I even came to believe that the most exciting thing that can happen on stage is for a band member to ‘crash’ in some way or other: be it a broken string, a dropped drum stick, an exploding amp, or whatever. For, only in these emergency situations might the rest of the band get a chance to demonstrate their true musical strengths and inventiveness. In these moments we musicians must be sharp enough, first, to notice that a comrade has fallen and, second, to be able to compensate with volume adjustments, ad hoc song rearrangement, instant impromptu solos, and whatever else that might be required.

The nudge incident had offended against the esprit do corp, and, after the gig the singer gave the guitarist a mouthful along the lines of, “…if you ever do anything like that to me on stage again, I’ll…”. His indignation was justified of course. But it should be added in the guitarist’s defence that it wasn’t until this incident that it really dawned on some of us just how completely visible one is on stage. It suddenly sunk in that when you’re up there, people can see everything you are doing. Henceforth, there was a bit less on-stage nose picking and trouser-adjustment.

* * *

The ‘nudge gig’ was followed, the very next night (Wednesday 25th February 1981), by the ‘shock gig’, which took place in the Dining Hall in the Elms’ students’ Hall of Residence. Whenever we could get it, we practised in this plush wood-panelled hall. It had great acoustics, moody subdued lighting and a marvelous big stage; a ‘proper’ gig situation and just the sort of thing our mannish young egos were after. This turned out to be a great gig, a solid contender for the ‘best gig’ position. But before we started the gig itself, there was a bit of drama. During our sound check the bass player got electrocuted half to death. One minute there he was, standing on stage messing about on his new bass. Then as he grabbed hold of his microphone, he completed the circuit and literally was knocked off his feet. The next minute he was flopping about on his back, his left hand clamped around the neck of his bass guitar with its four live strings, and his right hand equally tightly clamped around the deadly microphone. As the rest of the band looked on, initially confused and then horrified, the drummer was the only one who understood what was actually happening. As an electrician he had seen this sort of thing before, and, in one giant leap just like Superman or something, he dived onto the plug board and switched off the juice. There are no two ways about it, he saved the guy’s life right there and then.

The injured man, with blisters across the fingers of his left hand where they had been burned by the bass strings, said later that in those moments while he was on his back, he could feel his heart speeding up, ready to burst. The drummer pointed out that this wasn’t surprising considering that his heart was doing its best to get in sync with the fifty cycles per second alternating current that was pulsing through his nerves and muscles.

Not a big saving

On investigation we discovered that, due to a criminal piece of cost cutting, the fuses in the lighting rig that we had hired for the gig were in fact rolled-up bits of silver paper. Even after putting in proper fuses and checking the rest of the gear for any other nasty surprises, it required a good deal of guts just to switch the gear on again. After a while however, and allowing the bass player the right of veto, we all decided to go ahead with the gig and to put the ‘accident’ down to unpleasant but educational experience.

The rest of the night went tremendously well. We sensed that it was going to be a humdinger of a gig even before we went on. Technically it was a dream gig, (notwithstanding the near death incident). If the Elms was a great place to practice, it was a superb place to gig. The stage set-up was marvellous, with all the room in the world for jumping around. Also, there was no hassle with support bands or complicated sound check arrangements. Add to this a great crowd who were clearly ready and willing to be entertained. There were more than two hundred in our audience, and to our surprise and delight just about all of them to every single song. The joint jumped.

During the intro and first verse of one song I got so excited that I jumped off the stage for a quick dance with the audience. Then (perhaps inspired by the drummer’s giant leap earlier in the evening) I leapt back up on stage, just in time for the first chorus, and my chords on the Continental. Very cool it was. This was what happened when we found ourselves in front of an appreciative audience. The band shifted up a gear. We blossomed. We stretched out our paws and purred.

There was a comic moment too. Just before the last couple of songs of the night our singer announced on behalf of the management, as was the tradition, “last orders at the bar, please”. To his amazement and dismay, he turned around to see most of his band-mates obediently stepping off the stage in the direction of the bar. Drinking at an heroic rate, the guitarist and I had polished off our lavish beer supply. The singer pointed out afterwards that really there had been no need for us to panic. His announcement had not applied to the musicians, he explained. He was ahead of us on that one. Some of us were not quite so puffed up, as yet, with any sense of pop-stardom as to assume that we were exempt from the licensing laws.

Gig Memories 1980

Of all the songs my band practised in our early days during the late seventies, and there must have been more than forty songs all told, only a handful were ever to get a public airing. Musically speaking we didn’t need the hundreds of hours that we spent  rehearsing in garages and church halls. But then again, the groundwork in which the band was engaged wasn’t just about music. It had as much to do with learning how to be creative together, in spite of all the grievances and ructions that were to be expected among any group of intense egotistic teenage males. The trick was for us to stay in one room for a reasonable length of time without one of us walking out of it. It’s a small miracle when any band stays together long enough to get to their first gig.

But we made it through this first test, and, on a Saturday afternoon in May 1980, the band attempted a live performance. It was in a Church Hall on the Knock Road in front of a bunch of children and youths. And It was a desperate and pathetic affair. It was all the bass player’s fault. He wrote an outrageous letter to the vicar (or whoever) announcing that our band was in the middle of a “nation-wide tour” and that he thought it would be nice to offer our services to “some of the smaller venues in Belfast” before “continuing on our tour”.

It is quite possible that the vicar invited us along as a kindness, hoping to disabuse us of our fantastical self-delusion. Given the mocking disdain with which the kids treated us, one might even have imagined that they had been privy to our outrageous communication. God only knows, perhaps the vicar may well have pinned the letter to the notice board to give everyone a laugh, or even to illustrate to the young ones in his spiritual care the sad end awaiting those who give way to the temptations of pride and dishonesty.

For the most part, as we presented our music that tragic afternoon, our youthful audience paid us little heed. They didn’t even stop their games of table tennis, and what attention they did pay us we could have done without. 

Kids can be cruel and, whatever their reasons may have been, these little monsters went to town on us. They made a laughing stock of us. At one point a group of them paraded around in front of the stage waving a makeshift cardboard banner above their heads in a wounding parody of adoring fans. They had scrawled “George” on their pretend banner because, earlier, when they had asked for the guitarist’s name, to appease them, our singer had told them our guitarist was called George.

Roddy's in front of The Pound

Earlier in the day said guitarist and I had been in Roddy’s bar. Roddy’s, next door to The Pound, was our regular drinking hole and we’d been there for the whole afternoon. Thus, mercifully, we were pretty well lubricated, and, consequently, de-sensitised to the full horror of the situation. Still, having played a minimal set of just a few songs, we couldn’t get out of that church hall fast enough. It was not an illustrious launch to our concert career. None of us ever spoke of it again, and everything that followed was done in spite of it. 

I prefer to think of the embarrassing episode in the Knock Road church hall merely as an ill-advised dress rehearsal. This allowed, we might say that really the band’s debut was a few weeks later on Tuesday 24th June 1980, in the Devonshire Arms in Newtownards, an altogether more happy occasion. We went by the name of D.I.Y., an ad hoc name that we had settled on a few days earlier to facilitate the hurried printing of tickets and posters. ‘D.I.Y.’, perhaps, was meant to evoke the anti-music-industry self-help ethos of punk. 

Gary, who had sung with the band for a short while, had, with a little more savvy than the rest of us, organised the gig. We were to play support to Gary’s new band, with the dubious name of Blue Movie. Unfortunately, therefore, the poster that Gary posted outside the Devonshire Arms conjured up all sorts of unsavoury images. It read, “Tonight: Blue Movie plus D.I.Y.”

There was a surprisingly substantial crowd of about eighty souls, which was, I imagine, the best turn out the back bar in the Devonshire had seen in years. As support band, we went on first. We were very nervous behind our moody, nonchalant exterior. But the adrenaline was pumping, and we were more than sufficiently rehearsed. We played a steady gig, and we went down well with the punters. This was the set of covers that we presented:

Connotations

1. I Need To Know—Tom Petty
2. Breakdown—Tom Petty
3. Bye Bye Love—The Cars
4. Furniture Music—Bill Nelson
5. Moving In Stereo—The Cars
6. Sunday Papers—Joe Jackson
7. Dirty Water—Nine Below Zero
8. What Goes On—The Velvet Underground
9. Ghosts Of Princes In Towers—Rich Kids

Notwithstanding nervousness we had a good time, and D.I.Y. left the stage with the sound of applause ringing in our ears. Gary and his band got up to do their bit, but our excitement was such that none of us heard a note of Blue Movie’s set. As our hosts began to play, we adjourned with breath-taking and oblivious rudeness, to the front bar, where we had some serious drinking and self-congratulation to be getting on with.

The band was just starting to learn the ropes of live performance, and, because of some personal equipment difficulties, I had already learned one important first principle: Creativity and inspiration, skill and proficiency, all come to nought if the technology isn’t capable of delivering the music across to the punters. To coin a phrase: you can’t separate the art from the wires. Often when punters say, “I don’t think much of the band” what they really ought to be saying is, “I don’t think much of the amplification system”. It is not that one needs the best equipment that money can buy. But the gear one relies on must be up to the job. A Hammond C3 might be very nice, but then again, sometimes a Vox Continental is just the thing. The point is your Vox Continental (or whatever) must be in working order.

A second principle, which we all learned at our first gig, was this: The sound that the performers hear while on stage and the sound that the punters hear ‘out front’ are two very different things. As we came off stage, we shared one common observation: “It sounds weird up there”. In all but the best of gig situations, the performers will find themselves listening to a very odd mix of instruments and dislocated noise. Certainly, it is rare, in ordinary amateurish situations, for anyone on stage to hear the singer. Hence the oft seen finger-in-the-ear-folk-type-performance, as singers try to hang on to the tune by listening only to the sound inside their own skulls. There is, therefore, something else that the enlightened punter might take into account when passing judgement on some poor band or other. Not only is it true that a good performance on the part of the band is only part of what makes for a good sounding gig, but unfortunately it is also the case, conversely, that a good sound ‘out front’ doesn’t guarantee a good performance from the band. For it is always possible that, despite a passable sound out front, there may well be an absolutely abysmal sound on stage. Consequently, on occasions when a band sounds good, but seem to be giving less than their best, it may well be because they are the only people in the room who have absolutely no perception that the gig is actually going well.

Ready for a pop star's foot

The answer to all this is that the technology sufficient for a good gig must include a good ‘fold-back’ system. You know, those wedge shaped ‘monitor’ speakers you see at the feet of all the big pop stars. And then of course, while you’re at it, you will also need a bunch sound engineers to work away at getting the best possible sound, both on stage and out front, leaving the band to concentrate on making the best possible music. Furthermore, all these cabs and stuff would be awfully heavy. In a perfect world then we bands would also have to acquire a bunch of big guys to load the PA in and out of the van and to set it up. You know the type, greasy hair, T-shirts with rude jokes on them stretched across massive beer bellies. So, perhaps another important principle emerges: maybe you simply can’t separate the musicians from the technicians, anymore than you can separate the music from the technology.

After the gig we had considerable difficulty getting out of the town. The Troubles were still at their height and the security gates had been closed for the night. I remember sitting, squashed into the back of someone’s car that was packed to the roof with band gear, drunk and happy enough to not care if we spent all night driving around Newtownards looking for a way out. It had been an auspicious night, and an egotistical time was had by all. Back in Belfast (eventually), celebration and gig post-mortem followed. But really the whole concept of playing music live was lot more complicated than anything the five or us had, as yet, fully to imagine.

* * *

There was another gig the following Tuesday (1st July 1980). We returned to the Devonshire Arms to play second fiddle again to Blue Movie, this time under our new mane of Sample and Hold. In the days leading up to the gig the bass player warned against counting our chickens before they were hatched. As it turned out, he had a point. To our dismay, only about seven punters showed up for the show this time. It seemed that the gratifyingly large audience of the previous week was not something we had any right to expect. 

Naturally, our egos were bruised, but we did take some consolation from the fact that the ‘crowd’, while reduced, was enthusiastic. They even demanded an encore, and we obliged by shambling our way through Gloria. As we started into it I assumed an air of sophisticated condescension. I sought to portray myself and my colleagues on stage as new generation rockers, paying a merely tongue in check homage to the rockers of the past. My affected little smirk was saying “Oh all right then, we’ll do Gloria just to show that we can do that old stuff if we want to, but don’t imagine we 1980s guys take any of this outmoded stuff seriously or anything, I mean it’s not like we think Gloria is an ‘important’ song or anything”.

That's Jim with the glasses
in front of Van

In actual fact Gloria (originally recorded by Them in 1967) was a extremely important song, with near mystical significance for me. At the end of my schooldays just a few years earlier, I had spent nearly every Saturday afternoon grooving in The Pound Music Club. Local hero, and former member of Them, Jim Armstrong wowed the Pound regulars with his mastery of the electric guitar. Armstrong had a series of bands in the seventies within which to showcase his talents. The band I remember best was called Light. Appropriately enough a twelve-minute guitar-saturated version of Gloria had been adopted as the show-stopping climax of Light’s Saturday afternoon sets. We lapped it up. Punters would be hanging from the rafters chanting along, “Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A, Gloria”, and screaming for more. It was an adolescent ritual of quasi-religious proportions.

Admonished by the poor turnout at our second and last Devonshire Arms appearance, the band retreated to lick our wounds. There were no gigs to be had in Belfast in the summertime, so we practised a few new songs, dropped a few old songs, had a few drinks, made some plans and dreamed some dreams. We also wrote a song of our own.

The summer came to an end and, on Friday 3rd October 1980, we played at the Freshers’ Ball in the Speakeasy: one of the venues in Student’s Union building at Queen’s University. This was the first of many gigs we were to do around campus. Along with it we got our first mention in newsprint. The Students’ Union Gown newspaper read as follows:

The first big booze-up of the year will be, of course, the Freshers’ ball on Friday October 3rd. The kicking, punching, scratching and biting starts when the doors open at 8.00 p.m. ... introducing the bands––THE RUBBERS, RICHMOND HILL and SAMPLE & HOLD (that was not a misprint, that is their real name).

It was disappointing that this young journalist felt it necessary to draw attention to our name in such a negative way. Surely it wasn’t that difficult to grasp. Just for the record then, “Sample and Hold” had two senses. First, it could be taken as an invitation to one and all to come and try out our music. And then, having heard us, those who felt so inclined were further invited to embrace us and to retain our services. Fairly literally then, the invitation was to sample us, and to hold us. Second, for those with a passing acquaintance with electronics jargon, “Sample and Hold”, was meant to indicate quite simply that we were a band that was a bit more keyboards orientated than were some of our peers.

Along with the free publicity we also got sixty pounds for our trouble, this being our first pay cheque. I don’t think any of us had really thought about getting paid for playing music until this moment.  

The crowd was made up of some five or six hundred of the new crop of students, just out of school. The Freshers’ Ball was an essential part of the rites of passage for the keen ones. Back in 1980 I was something of an inverted snob and I had a dislike of students; sour grapes really. I just envied students their extended childhood, as they gently entered adulthood, protected in their cushioning cloisters from the abrasions of a working life.

Upon my carbuncle of envy there now grew a wart of contempt. The Speakeasy crowd, to my eyes, displayed stereotypical student-type apathy, and my jaundice view of their fraternity was substantiated. It seemed to me that not knowing the misery of a full week’s work there was no urgency in their attempts at escapism. While I applauded their, undoubtedly sincere, drinking efforts, I found them to be sadly inexperienced and inept, and very disturbing to look at. There was vomit everywhere.

Notwithstanding my personal politics of envy, the students in the Speakeasy on this particular Friday night stepped outside of their stereotype. Despite their affected apathy, there was a perceptible reaction to our sound. They could not help but prick up their ears as we hit the stage to give our newly penned original song its first nervous airing. Heads turned at the freshness of our synthesiser-driven music. Heads turned, even among the throng scrambling for their lager and their vodka at the jammed-up trough that was the Speakeasy bar. Sample and Hold were on the stage and heads turned.

* * *

Gig number three was to be in Spuds in Portstewart (Monday 19th October 1980), and, in the hope of getting some publicity for it, we sent off a letter and a photograph to The Coleraine Chronicle. They printed the photo along with this write-up: “Sample & Hold,” a band who produce “1980’s pop music,” are making a debut appearance in Spuds, Portstewart, this Friday night October 24. The five cite Bill Nelson, XTC, Lou Reed, Roxy Music and several other new wave/reggae bands as influences on their music. ...” It’s funny to think that it seemed okay and even sophisticated for us to credit ourselves with making “1980’s pop music”. With hindsight it’s hard to think of very much in the history of music that is less sophisticated than 1980’s pop music.

Subversion in Disguise

The photo had been taken just after the Speakeasy gig. We looked passable, standing and sitting on the concrete back staircase in the Student’s Union. We didn’t look great, but we would do. One real problem with the picture however was that our bass player had his eyes closed. So, before we sent it off to the Chronicle, we salvaged the photo by adding rock star sunglasses with a black felt-tipped pen. The Bass player now looked the best of the lot of us. Which is not to say very much. I myself could not have been less rock and roll if I had tried. I invariably wore ill fitting jeans, (the sort of non-designer-label jeans one buys because they are ‘such good value’) plus a very standard navy jumper, and utterly style-less training shoes (we didn’t say ‘trainers’ back then). My hair was greasy, colourless and longish: by which I mean only that it was not short. It wasn’t any definite length at all, really. 

 Along with all this I had been wearing the same, infinitely un-hip, Harris Tweed jacket for about a year and a half. Originally, the strategy behind my choice of the Harris Tweed was borrowed from that of the Dadaists and the Surrealists, who had assumed an image of conventionality in order to accentuate their subversive intent. A bit like the bowler hats in Monty Python satire. This was the road I had started down when I was eighteen, but I hadn’t really followed through very well.

Of us all the bass player, perhaps, had at least some claim to an active policy on image. He said that he was ‘anti-image’. By fastidiously avoiding any item of attire that might have been perceived as fashionable, or that may have attract attention of any kind, he sought to guard himself, I suppose, against the accusation of being a poser. ‘Poser’ was a damning and much bandied term of abuse in the early eighties. Unfortunately, however, there was no escape. For, if our bass player was serious about his non-image being intentional (unlike my own), then, as a would-be pop star with an every-day appearance, it was clear that he was merely posing as a non-poser. Life can be difficult when you’re young, not to mention paradoxical.

When we got to Spuds (Friday 24th October 1980 ) we discovered that there had never really been any chance of the proper turnout, for which, naturally, we had hoped. Friday night, it transpired, was simply not the right night to be playing Spuds. Saturday night was the ‘happening night’ up there, and the only good reason for a band to play on a Friday night, was to ‘get in’ with the management and maybe, thereby, to ‘earn’ a gig some other time, on a Saturday. Sample and Hold never did get in with Spuds’ management, and we never did earn a Saturday slot.

Nevertheless, while we played to only the most modest of crowds, all was not lost. There was a young punter in attendance who, single-handedly, made it worth the trip. He really enjoyed himself, as he danced all by himself to our impressively faithful rendition of Bill Nelson’s Furniture Music and a few other numbers besides. The glorious Sample and Hold had their first glorious fan. After the gig our fan thanked us and complemented us on our inspired choice of music. He may have been a mere schoolboy, but this guy was on the ball. He had more of an idea about Sample and Hold’s image and musical direction than we had ourselves. This was the sort of feedback we needed.

I never caught his name but clearly this fan of ours was sincerely delighted with the idea of a band in Northern Ireland playing electronic sounding pop music. I think he was, at heart, in the vanguard of New Romanticism, God love him. In return, I thanked him for his enthusiastic, if rather strange, dancing.

The sixty miles to Portstewart on the North Coast was a bit of a trek for us Belfast boys. So, for our Spuds gig we hired a van from a guy called Billy Maxwell. Billy's Ford Transit was probably not actually roadworthy, but it came cheap and since Billy was doing the driving this meant that, as we hit the M2, everyone could relax, by which I mean that those who were so inclined could drink heavily.

A Transit from that era

We needed a van, now. We had a lot of gear. Since we were intent on bashing the music out pretty much as loud as we could, our singer needed something more than a spare guitar amp to give his tonsils a bit of a leg up. To this end we had resolved to keep our hire-costs low by building up a nice big P.A. system all our own. At this point, just three gigs into our concert career, we were surprisingly well on our way towards our dream of a one thousand watt system, or, as we technicians like to say, ‘a 1K rig’. We had four one-by-fifteen bass bins, a pair of two-by-twelve mid range cabs and a pair of high frequency horns for up on top. We also had an impressive looking twelve channel mixing desk. To power all this we had a couple of one hundred watt slave amps, and for the time being we still had to hire a main power amp.

The good thing about having our own P.A. was that we soon became familiar with how all the cabs and stuff might fit together to make the journey to and from gigs as comfortable as possible, especially for the poor suckers who got jammed in the back. A method developed whereby the guitarist would stand in the van and stack the gear as logic dictated while the rest of us handed him the drum cases, amps, cabs and boxes, as required. I say ‘the rest us’, but I myself did a lot more than my fair share of the work. From the outset we two took pride in our work. Nothing ever got damaged. Nothing ever rattled about or came adrift as the van bumped along home. Best of all, we who were consigned to ‘the back’ could travel in style. We had comfortable seats, made from bass cabs and coats and cushions, with mid range cabs and drum cases to lean back on. With just a few more gigs for practice, there would no longer be a race for the front seat in the van. If it was a sleep you were after on the way home, the place to be was in the back with the gear.

* * *

As we continued to learn the ropes of live performance, I realised another important principle of rock ‘n’ roll regardinging a balancing act with chemicals affecting the brain. On the one hand there was the adrenaline, which was out in force due to excitement and occasional nervousness. On the other hand there was the antidote: alcohol. The procedure for maintaining an equilibrium was delicate and had at least three stages:

Stage one: Getting drunk enough to go on stage, with a few tins in the van on the way to the gig, and then a few pints from the bar while we got the gear set up. 

Stage two: Getting drunker and drunker while on stage. This meant having a relay of friends and associates planted in the audience, who would be kind enough to bring up the drink at very regular intervals as we worked our way through the set.

Stage three: The inevitable crash. The moment we hit the last note of the last song, the tension and excitement was spent and the adrenaline was gone. The equilibrium was dashed. A nosedive into utter crapulence ensued.

The band in 1980

Three weeks later (on Friday 14th November 1980) we made our second appearance in the Speakeasy. The gig was heralded in the Belfast Telegraph’s Friday Rock Column, with a short bio of the band and a photo taken around the side of the Students’ Union just before our previous appearance. The gig was a support slot with a band called Male Caucasians, who hailed from the Dunmurry. As I walked in to the Speakeasy and saw the Male Caucasians guys doing their sound check, I was transported in my mind back to a night three and a half years earlier, and the occasion of my first ever gig … picture goes all wobbly … cascading harp music…

It was in the spring of 1977. I got my first sniff of stardom in the Wilmer, a celebrated hard rock venue favoured by bikers and other longhaired types, in the seaside town of Newcastle at the foot of the Mourn Mountains. The main act for the night was Emerald, a straight-ahead rock band doing Thin Lizzy covers. A couple of years down the road Emerald would change their name to Male Caucasians.

Brubeck: early role model 

I performed as half of a duo with a guy called Mark, who was another graduate from the ‘Dunmurry school of rock’. Dunmurry on the southern outskirts of Belfast was a hotbed of musicians and would-be popsters. I had teamed up with Mark just a few weeks earlier having answered his ad in one of the music shops. It wasn’t a support slot as such for mark and me, but more a matter of us doing a few numbers while the ‘big boys’ in the ‘real band’ took their break. Nevertheless, I was only sixteen and, as I remember it, it was quite an impressive début. We played four tunes in all. On the last song, one of Mark’s, I played electric guitar and I even did a solo. The first two songs in our mini-set were also Mark’s creations, but the third number was a five minute unaccompanied solo for me on my Crumar electric piano. The piece I played was a jazzy thing inspired by Dave Brubeck: not at all usual fare for the Wilmer. I was scared to bits, naturally, but I kept my head down, concentrated on the music, and gave a pretty good account of myself. I had been developing my unnamed little piano extravaganza since I was twelve or maybe even younger. Getting to play it live was a dream come true.

When I finished my brave little virtuoso performance on that heady summer evening, it took a few moments for me to come back down to earth. When I did, I realised that just about everyone in the capacity audience of scary bikers and backdated hippies was applauding. Some were even a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’. It also dawned on me at that moment that the place had been respectfully quiet while I had been playing. I was a hit. About fifteen years of ego-related problems were to follow.