How did this happen? And why?
I left school in 1977, just as punk was kicking off, and in my gap year, whilst other people were doing useful and interesting things, got a job in WH Smith's storeroom and joined a band, Idiot Rouge (Yes, I know; terrible name). In the course of that year we must have done 50 gigs round the North West - Liverpool, Manchester of course, Sheffield, Stoke. Through them I met Clive Gregson, singer of the pub rock band Any Trouble, and my memories of that year are of endless journeys with The Trubs, as we called them, in unreliable vans to far flung venues where we or they, or both, would play to three men and a dog for thirty quid; that and laughing quite a lot.
I also wrote a song called Playing Bogart. I was living with my parents; I was due to start a law degree at the end of 1978; I didn't want to be a lawyer; I wanted to be a pop star (more accurately a famous guitarist/songwriter of the brooding Tom Verlaine type); I didn't have a girlfriend; I was probably quite lonely. I remembered going into Manchester for the WH Smith works do around Christmas 1977, and looking at all the traffic, and the people going out, feeling like an outsider, contemplating the area where romance meets disillusionment from the windows of the 101 bus. I was a bit young to feel like this, but I'd been feeling like it for years and I suppose part of me still does.
Playing Bogart was one of the more popular items in Idiot Rouge's set, and when I left for University and our drummer, John Doyle, quit to join Magazine, the rump of the band, now called the Cheaters, carried on playing it for a while. At Nottingham I met some other musicians, Geoff Powers, Mark Buckle and Simon Harris, and we had a band called Sneak and the Previews (yes, I know; terrible name). It didn't take me long to get fed up of Simon, no doubt more my problem than his, but without him there was only the rump of a band and Mark Buckle, unhappy with my hissy fit, declined further involvement for a while. Meanwhile all around Britain bands were making their own records on a shoestring and I was desperate to be involved in this resurgence. I therefore hatched the plan of recording Playing Bogart and another song, You Don't Know Me, and releasing the resulting single myself.
There had to be other musicians involved, so I got together with Sneak and the Previews drummer Geoff Powers, Paddy Russell, a bass playing friend from school, and a guitarist I knew from Manchester, Neil Roberts, who was now at Nottingham too. We all met up in Manchester at my parents' house. The band photo was taken on the staircase as my Mum called us down for tea. I had positioned my Grandfather's Zeiss Ikon bellows camera on the stairs so that I was in full view, trying to look as much like Tom Verlaine as possible, and the others could be seen by means of carefully positioned mirrors. I taught Paddy the songs the night before the session. He had never heard them before, and in fact never played with the band again. I had decided we would be called 23 Jewels (yes, I know; terrible name). It was something written on the face of my watch.
The recording was chaotic. Nowadays the average PC has far more sophisticated recording equipment in it than did Pennine Studios, Oldham in 1978, and underground records are no longer made in the same tearing hurry. But we had paid for the studio time between us, and the first rule of recording on a budget was Be Prepared. Or to be more accurate, Be Well Rehearsed. We weren't. Notwithstanding that, the only real hitch came when we were trying to record Neil's guitar breaks at the end of Bogart. Neil was a great player, someone who came at the instrument from the angle of his heroes, guitarists like Jan Akkerman and Larry Carlton, rather than the basic thrashing fashionable at the time. As Clive Gregson, who produced the record, said, Neil always played as if he was just about to do something amazing; and sometimes he did. But he had not worked out what he was going to do, and faced with having to do something now, he was badly affected by nerves. In the end I played the first break, and for the fade out we actually put two of his solos together, one on top of the other, and it worked fine.
About the process of getting the records mastered and pressed I remember almost nothing. I do remember that Geoff, the drummer, and I hired a car and drove to London to collect them. At one point we found ourselves driving down Regent St. It was the first time I'd been to London, and finding myself somewhere familiar from all sorts of fiction was a thrill; within five years I was living there. Afterwards we took a box to Rough Trade records on Portobello road. Geoff Travis, the proprietor, listened to the record gravely and bought a hundred from us on the spot. We couldn't believe our luck. Later I sent the record to John Peel and to the NME. God love us, Peel actually played it, not once but several times; and Tom Robinson made it single of the week in the paper.
Clearly, we felt, it was only a matter of time before the record companies came knocking. We would obviously show our disdain for the majors before perhaps signing for one of the trendier minor labels. But in fact that didn't happen. A journalist interviewed us for the NME, but the story was spiked. 23 Jewels, now with Mark Buckle back on bass, did the rounds in Nottingham and further afield through 1979 and for a couple of years afterwards, but the big time never came. Astonishingly, we were a cult band, although at the time it felt as if we were just not very popular. On the Youtube Playing Bogart page someone has kindly written "The finest, most unique sounding band to come out of Nottingham". Unfortunately not many people said that kind of thing at the time, and anyway we never did really emerge from Nottingham. Things might have been different if we'd been from Manchester or Sheffield.
After a while Playing Bogart was quietly dropped from the band's set list: I didn't like playing it because it was too poppy. Our friends Any Trouble recorded it on their first album. At the end of 1982 I moved to London in pursuit of a girl, and fame and fortune. My own interests were shifting slowly but irreversibly towards classical music, and by the end of '84 I was at Music College doing a composition diploma.
So how does it feel to see this record, made on a whim by a bunch of 20 year olds in the sketchiest of circumstances, praised to the skies? Do I mind that other stuff I've done subsequently has made only a fraction of the impression? Well, no, not really. I think it is a good song, and the recording, no matter how crude, captures a performance that, as Tom Robinson said at the time, has an enthusiasm and passion that cannot be faked.
Do I mind that I didn't become a famous guitarist/songwriter in the Tom Verlaine mould as per my aspirations then? No, not much. I am happy to be doing what I'm doing now, and aware of how lucky I am in so nearly all aspects of my life that it would seem churlish to complain about any of them. We are in any event the sum of our experiences. Who is to say that if that had been different, the other things would have been just as good? Still, it's quietly pleasing to see the song remembered in Dave Roberts' top 12 (even if it is only at number 9).
To finish, I recommend that you listen to the Trubs's own version of the tune here and watch the hilarious video which goes with it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95KYEoheL1E. Alternatively, you can have a look at this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxM0tn7R_JM - from their November 2013 reunion gig. Who is that mystery guest guitarist?
