The Wrong And Winding Road: The Keatons tour of Scotland, 1990
Sunday 26th August 1990: London
“Error.”
Whenever anything went wrong, Steve usually said “Error”. Things went wrong so often that shouting was a waste of energy. Saying “error” in a calm, measured tone acknowledged the dreadfulness of a situation without making the crisis feel any worse. It also gave the rest of us permission to have a moment of quiet reflection. When a member of our tour party once tried to bring ecstasy into Belgium, causing us all to be strip searched by a brusque moustachioed border guard, that was an error. When we drove for 30 hours to get to a gig in Hungary only to discover that it had been cancelled in favour of a Depeche Mode-themed club night, that was an error, too. And when, on that late summer morning, Steve rolled up to our rendezvous in a Luton van — a vehicle normally used for moving furniture — that was a big error. Error squared. Error to the power of error.
Earlier, Steve had been to Hattons, then known for being the cheapest van hire company in London. Their vans were poor, but so were we, so we took our chances. Annoyingly, Hattons was unable to honour our booking for a minibus that day, on account of them having no minibuses. God knows how their state-of-the-art booking system had failed us in our hour of need, but it landed us in the middle of a small emergency. The Keatons’ tour of Scotland was about to begin, and we needed a vehicle to get our pasty complexions and malfunctioning equipment up there. It wasn’t just us in a pickle, either. Friends of ours, a band from Epping called Pregnant Neck, were doing the tour with us. So Steve did only thing he felt he could do. He took up the offer of a furniture van, signed the necessary forms and drove off.
The Keatons took great pride in the fact that we’d never turn down or cancel a gig, regardless of the circumstances. More cautious bands might consider things like budget, distance, availability of band members, or even whether they felt like doing it or not. But we did everything. If we had no vehicle, we’d beg or borrow one from someone, somehow. If all our equipment had been stolen — as it was on more than one occasion — we’d turn up without any and ask to borrow some. If the drummer forgot about the gig and failed to show up, we’d ask another band’s drummer to sit in. As band members realised that gigs would go ahead whether they were present or not, they would sometimes opt out, in the same way you might opt out of attending a barbecue. Friends and acquaintances would be quickly drafted in to replace them. We’d look at the resources available and then decide who would do what, like a hastily-formed 5-a-side football team. Lyrics would be quickly scribbled on bits of paper and songs taught to newcomers in the back of the van. This made for performances of extremely variable quality. Sometimes we were brilliant. On many occasions we pulled off unlikely triumphs through sheer force of will. We could also be complete shit. But you could say one thing about us: something calling itself The Keatons would sure as hell turn up, whether you wanted us to or not.
On a leafy road not far from Arsenal tube station, ten of us stood on the pavement, casting nervous glances at this van. It had three seats in the front, and room in the back for the contents of a small semi-detached home, or in this case two small, semi-detached bands. The current members of The Keatons — myself, Simon K, Steve, Warren and Mo — knew the band ethic only too well, and had already embraced the new reality. Our destiny was to get in and emulate a sofa, perhaps a sideboard. Our friend Nik, who had foolishly chosen to spend his annual summer holiday accompanying us on this jaunt, also knew the score. Pregnant Neck — Lee, Simon W, Paul and Anthony — had, understandably, a number of pressing questions, including “is this legal?” and “Can’t we just go home?” But eventually, somehow, they were persuaded to join us. Seven men clambered in the back and arranged themselves amongst a selection of drums, amplifiers, guitars and sleeping bags. The rear door was pulled down and secured, plunging us into semi-darkness. This tour was due to last two weeks, and in a triumph of logistical planning the first date of the tour would be at a small hotel in Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides. That was 20 hours, 700 miles of road and a ferry trip away.
Error.
We’d started to get into the habit of keeping a tour diary, using one of Mo’s art books to write down any thoughts, experiences and weak puns that we thought should be captured for posterity. That morning, Mo put pen to paper to describe the experience of sitting inside the van. “It is like a biscuit tin with an airtight door,” he wrote. “It is very hot, and sitting in the back is rather like sitting in a moderate-to-hot gas oven, with the gas on but not lit, during an earthquake.” At our first motorway service stop, we came up with the idea of tying the back door slightly open to leave a small gap, which would hopefully allow a bit more air in. As we set off, however, we realised that it just sucked in exhaust fumes. Worse, in these pre-mobile phone days, it was impossible to alert the three people up front to tell them that we needed the toilet, or a sandwich, or to breathe, or whatever. Thankfully, our second stop came fairly swiftly after the first. Sweet relief! But as the back door was rolled up, we were confronted by two policemen. They had pulled us over onto the hard shoulder after spotting someone’s hairy leg through the gap.
Given that you could probably be arrested for transporting livestock in this manner, it was hardly surprising that the police took a dim view of trying to covertly smuggle two indie bands across the Northamptonshire border. Our nerves became frayed further when we remembered that Warren, our drummer, had been driving the van without insurance. The police made it clear that this state of affairs could not continue. We would have to exit at the next junction and proceed to the nearest railway station, where seven of us would have to buy train tickets for the onward journey. Contrite and apologetic, we agreed to this plan. We got back in the van, but as no one had enough money for a train ticket, it was clear what was going to happen: we’d proceed up the motorway with the back door shut properly and keep our fingers crossed that we weren’t stopped for a second time. Sure enough, that’s what we did.
In the back, we made the best of a bad situation by inventing various games, which we played using Mo’s touring kit. Mo was The Keatons’ performance artist, not a usual role in your standard five-piece band, but in our case a crucial one. For each song in the set, Mo would act out scenes and express himself in various extraordinary ways, usually in a state of semi-nakedness, using things like crash helmets, plastic tubing, tutus, bamboo cane, tinned food, face paint and a shitload of cardboard. The pre-gig routine would involve him spending about three hours assembling all his gear into a magnificent tableau. Then, for the duration of our 40 minute set, he would rip it to pieces while dancing in a completely unrestrained fashion.
During the day, Mo worked at London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden. In the evenings, he did things like reenact sumo wrestling bouts using hard boiled eggs. No one worked harder than Mo. He went without food, broke ribs and slept very little. When The Keatons monster roused itself into activity, with Mo brandishing sparklers or enormous cardboard signs while hurling himself about, many audiences could barely believe what they were witnessing. Their minds would be blown. Others, particularly venue managers, sound engineers and other bands on the bill, hated it. Occasionally, people would get very pissed off. After we’d finished our set, the stage would often be in total chaos. Sweat, toothpaste and flour would congeal to form an unappealing dough, lodging in any available crevice. Band members might find themselves connected together with long lengths of twine. Microphone stands would have to be reassembled and guitars patched up with gaffer tape. But Mo was always so polite and charming that we always managed to avoid being beaten up or threatened with litigation. (Although we did get banned from Norwich Arts Centre.) Below, Steve, Simon, Mo and Warren appear on ITV’s indie show Transmission to try to offer an explanation.
“There’s a lot of rubbish about,” noted Simon W in the tour diary. He was right, but Mo’s kit did contain a ball and various items that could be fashioned into bats, so we played a range of improvised racquet sports as we rumbled up the M6. It helped us to forget, briefly, that we were one police caution away from the tour ending before it had even started. But as Mo records in the diary: “By the time we reached Glasgow the fumes were so bad that all our lungs had diffused outside our bodies and were branching out, like pieces of coral, from our tracheas.” We had an hour’s break in Glasgow, where we met friends of ours — another band, Dawson — for a drink. They would be joining us in a couple of days to form a majestic triple-headline bill; they clocked the unappealing transport situation that they would soon be contending with, but appeared to accept their fate stoically. Then we got back in the van for the next leg of the journey, an overnight drive to Ullapool, from where we’d get the ferry to Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. I’d love to tell you what Loch Glascarnoch looked like with the moonlight glinting off it, but I can’t, because I was in the back of a furniture van.
Monday 27th August 1990: Stornoway Seaforth Hotel
From now on, every entry and exit to the back of the van had to be done in secret, usually down a side street, while someone kept lookout for police, hi-vis vest-wearers or anyone vaguely official-looking. At Ullapool port at 7.30am, the coast was clear, so we slid out onto the tarmac to be greeted by hazy Highland sunshine. For some reason I can’t remember — but almost certainly financial — we weren’t able to take the van any further, so we humped drums, amps and belongings to the quayside, then loaded them onto some kind of wagon with a trailer, which then rolled onto the ferry as we slouched along wearily behind it. I remember the crossing being completely beautiful. Blue sky, blue sea and thousands of jellyfish in the sea, an extraordinary spectacle.
At Stornoway Port, we secured the services of a man driving an open-backed truck. We piled all our stuff onto it and climbed on, creating the most unappealing carnival float you’ve ever seen. We proceeded to the venue, The Seaforth. (I just checked on Google Maps, and no, it’s not there any more. Few of the venues on this tour still exist. More evidence to support a theory of The Keatons’ Kiss Of Death.) Mo spent all afternoon setting up, building new costumes and sculptures, while the rest of us did the usual thing of sound-checking and then mooching about for ages. (As a band-mate of mine noted many years later, the concept of “free time” on tour is a rather peculiar one. Instead of making use of it, you tend to sit there and wait for it to go away.) By 9pm, Steve had set up a small table by the entrance, and began trying to charge people £1.50 to get in. Very few took him up on the offer. Most of them turned through 180º and made good their escape. We abandoned the idea of trying to take money and instead stood outside on the street, asking people to come in and watch for free. That didn’t work, either. By the time Pregnant Neck took the stage, there were about 15 people in the audience. They stood, motionless, as Epping’s finest romped through a deliberately discordant and lumpy set of improbable tunes.
Pregnant Neck were a wonderful band. I’d first heard a cassette of theirs entitled “Stomach” as a 16 year old fanzine writer, and fell in love with its grubby charm. The brains of the outfit was Lee, an astonishing guitarist who, instead of learning the guitar “properly”, had developed his own unique, left-handed, long-fingered style which frequently sounded like two guitarists playing at once. (“To this day I have no clue how he played guitar like that,” Anthony said to me recently.) Heavily influenced by John Peel favourites such as Bogshed, their set included such magnificent songs as Pie & Mash, No Time For Breakfast, The Ultimate Sandwich, and Cake. Their repertoire also featured songs about things other than food, e.g. silicone implants, Crispin Glover, etc.
Paul, the singer, would sing (or, more usually, shout and scream) while dancing symmetrically. What the left leg or arm did, the right leg or arm would do too. A human hall of mirrors. Simon W thwacked drums, and Anthony, who’d recently joined the band, played bass. That night, The Keatons applauded their efforts heartily, which was fortunate, because barely anyone else did.
Then it was our turn. We went down slightly better with the locals (the crowd now numbering about 20), which was mainly thanks to Mo. If people didn’t like our music (“a bit like Wire or The Fall” was how we usually described it to anyone who asked) then Mo could always hold their attention by bellowing down a cardboard tube while wearing a wedding dress, or something. The diary notes that this evening he debuted a performance entitled “Yellow Woman, Two Stupid Dogs and Scary Hat”, which sounds about right. And then it was closing time, and the bemused audience wandered off, leaving us to stand about and ponder why we’d come all that way while knowing, deep down, that a Monday night in Stornoway was never likely to deliver much in the way of conventional reward. But, you know, such things should never be pondered for long. After being harangued by the bar staff, we cleared up the mess and were given permission to cram ourselves into two hotel rooms upstairs. By 1am we were all asleep, for the first time in over 36 hours.
Three hours later, the alarm went off.
Tuesday 28th August 1990: Glasgow Talk Of The Town
The dreaded 4am alarm was to ensure we got ourselves and our stuff back to the ferry for the return journey, this time without the assistance of a man or a truck. The only wheels available were a few shopping trolleys we found near the hotel, so we filled them up and moved in convoy, through pouring rain and thick fog, along the seafront. I remember looking back over my shoulder and seeing Mo emerging from the gloom, his trolley piled high with disassembled performance art, rain driving into his face. I started giggling in that delirious way one does in moments of extreme tiredness when everything is a bit shit. “A passing taxi driver looked at us as if he had seen a visitation by Our Lady Of Lourdes,” he noted in the diary.
Back in Ullapool, when no one was looking, we re-entered the Van of Almost Certain Death and made our way back to Glasgow. The atmosphere in the back was darkening. Two camps were forming, and it wasn’t entirely along band lines. The Keatons were, in the main, sanguine about the discomfort, probably seeing it as the price you had to pay in order to have something to write about in an overly-long blog post 30 years later. The exception was our drummer Warren, a man who, let’s say, didn’t spend much time pondering the notion of suffering for the sake of art. He used to be in the army, and had been hired a few weeks earlier after two other drummers left the band in fairly rapid succession. He was the first person to respond to an advert we’d stuck on the wall in the Rough Trade shop in Notting Hill, so he was in. Musically, this wasn’t ideal; dozens of our songs had a “bm tch-bm, bm-tch” rhythm (think, uh, Happy Hour by The Housemartins) which he wasn’t able to play. From my perspective it wasn’t ideal on a social level either, but back then, young and foolish as I was, I had trouble relating to older men sporting moustaches and green tracksuit bottoms. Anyway, Warren found that he had more in common with Pregnant Neck, so they began to hang out.
Anthony, the member of Pregnant Neck not pictured above, felt more cosmically aligned to The Keatons, and he began to drift within our ambit, for all the good it did him, poor sod.
We arrived at the venue at around 7pm. Mo notes in the diary: “It’s a fabulous venue with a mirrorball, New York skyline decorations, semi-circular stage and lots of mirrors.” We were told that we’d be onstage at midnight, leaving another lovely long period for us to sit about doing nothing. Tonight, however, was probably going to be good. Glasgow was one of those places where difficult pop music drew a crowd. Dawson would be joining us on the bill, and ending the night would be The Ex, from Amsterdam, a band who had a profound effect all of us in that “scene” at that time. Their musical and political aesthetic was utterly spellbinding. You’d never see a more intense, inventive, intelligent band.
My memory of Pregnant Neck’s performance was that I started dancing (like a lord, Mo tells me) and kept being aggressively grabbed by some pissed-up arsehole, making me upset and fearful. I was only 18 years old and just embarking on an exciting adulthood characterised by anxiety and terror. I was reassured by Glaswegian friends that he was “only being friendly”, rather like when you’re being savagely attacked by a bulldog near a leisure centre. Anyway, there was a crowd of a couple of hundred people, The Keatons were pretty good, Dawson were brilliant and The Ex put us all to shame. When they played they made you question your whole approach to making music — almost a punk-like awakening. “What? You can do THAT?” So on the whole, this was a good day. Perhaps the Stornoway experience was just an aberration, and it would be uphill from here on. Perhaps.
Wednesday 29th August 1990: Edinburgh Phoenix
Daytimes on Keatons tours were generally spent laying about in sleeping bags and waiting to be told to move, either by the person who was hosting us on their living room floor, or by band members reminding us that we had a gig to get to. Today we were heading to Edinburgh, where the annual festival was drawing to a close. It would be reasonable to assume that the residents of the city had, over the previous four weeks, become weary of wide-eyed entertainers peddling their dubious acts, but now everything was going to be OK because we were going to turn up and show everyone how it ought to be done.
Perhaps predicatably, the angular noise of The Keatons, Pregnant Neck and Dawson had been wedged into the middle of a cabaret bill. Preceding us was a comedy double act who I think were called “Manic And Marvel”, and judging by the abusive comments in the tour diary, we didn’t think they were up to much. As they performed songs about the Swedish and aardvarks and did a pretend mind-reading act, Mo attempted to set up. He asked the woman behind the bar if she had a tin opener — prunes and spaghetti were to form part of his performance this evening — to which she replied “You’ll no be eating your tea in here, sonny.” He proceeded to walk down the road to another bar and get them to open his tins for him. All in a day’s work.
The Keatons went first. In the diary, Steve describes our performance as “workmanlike”, “delivered by an uncharacteristically sober band.” Mo hit a man with glasses in the face with a carrot, sending the carrot one way and his glasses the other, for which Mo apologised. (Mo became so brilliant at apologising over the years that I felt he could have got away with anything. Arson. Decapitation.) “Half-hearted calls for an encore were treated with disdain and indifference,” Steve notes. Then it was Dawson’s turn. I always adored the way they shouted at me at about geopolitical crises while jumping about. They played at breakneck speed and were completely thrilling.
Pregnant Neck had a difficult night. Paul couldn’t hear himself singing. The sound engineer mumbled something about the amps being too loud (a frequent problem with bands like ours in small rooms: if you turned the amps down you sounded weedy, but if you turned them up everything fed back and made an unbearable, all-engulfing squeal). Things got exciting when Paul, frustrated with the lack of sonic clarity, left the room and sung from the corridor. Guitars broke, things deteriorated spectacularly and Paul screamed “Fucking guitarists”. The sound remained terrible. Steve: “The set ends on a note of high comedy when the encore is done without singing due to the mike having been turned off, but it’s turned back on as soon as the song as finished. First rate entertainment.”
We had to load our stuff out of the bar and into the van as the cabaret continued. (The acts are listed in the tour diary as Ralph Slippers and John Marvellous Ribena, although that’s likely to have been made up.) The van was then driven into a quiet side street in order for everyone, including Dawson, to climb in for the journey back to Glasgow. Ten people in the back: a new record. The comments in the diary become more irritable. “This van sucks all the pollution from all of the world and I hate it,” wrote Warren. I also weighed in for the first time, urging calm. “VAN SITUATION = one where people can easily show annoying quirks, myself included,” I scrawled illegibly, probably drunk. “Tolerance needed,” I added, although whether I was showing such tolerance myself is debatable.
Thursday was to be a day off, which in any normal walk of life would be a cause for celebration and relaxation, but on tour it tends to make people fidgety and restless. In an attempt to block out the horror of free time, we slept until 3pm and went to The Lauder’s on Sauchiehall Street, where I learned how to pronounce Sauchiehall Street and got drunk again. We then went to watch two other bands play at a local bar. A busman’s holiday! Afterwards we headed to a kebab shop, where we managed to convince another customer that we were 1970s pop legends The Police. As Simon K noted in the diary: “Steve’s autograph will, one day, return to haunt him.”
Friday 31st August 1990: Greenock The Club
Two months earlier, The Keatons had a launch party for our 12" mini-album, Seven, at The Old Queens Head in Brixton. It was a substantially different band. Warren hadn’t yet joined. Ken, the original Keatons drummer, had been persuaded to come back and play for one more night only — honestly, Ken, we promise! — after having left the band a few weeks earlier because he’d had enough. Dave, the original guitarist, was on what you might call a Keatons holiday, albeit a grim holiday spent suffering from an almighty stress-related illness. This had first manifested itself back in May, at a cataclysmic gig at North London Polytechnic. We missed Dave terribly, and didn’t really know when (or if) he’d be back. (Simon K, a friend of the band, would soon be drafted in to replace him, and he’d end up replacing various other band members as they fell by the wayside due to ailments or indifference. On the Scottish tour, he did the job of two people simultaneously — singing and guitaring — with great aplomb.)
On vocals was Neil, who was the proper singer of the band (because he wrote all the songs and sang on all the records) but you’d rarely encounter him at our gigs, because he didn’t do many of them. The Keatons had almost become his emissaries, taking his songs and thrashing seven shades of shit out of them at venues across the UK and Europe. In this video excerpt from that launch party, I’m doing all the guitar duties, attempting to cover mine and Dave’s bits by myself. Steve plays bass, as ever, and Mo is brushing everyone’s teeth, having earlier painted his face blue.
The gig in Greenock was remarkable for the chaos that Mo caused. In a personal diary I’ve scribbled “Mad. Everything breaks, everyone falls over and Mo gets his knob out on the bar, much to the delight of the barman.” Mo has his own version of this story, which he messaged me the other day:
The penis on the bar incident was made all the more hilarious because this huge bear of a man, with a skinhead and heavily tattooed, had been staring at me all night. When “all my clothes fell off”, he just stared and stared at my genitals, and then reached forward with his giant hairy hand and cupped my testicles. I thought to myself “I am going to be castrated, for sure, tonight, Maurice, you will die”, and the man just said with an amazed shake of the head “I’m soo sorry wee man, I thought ye were just a fit lassie with a good plum”, words which have haunted me to this day. I’d just got away with a little bit of respect from the barman, when I pulled an entire shelf off the wall.
Appreciation of Mo’s efforts would sometimes come from the unlikeliest of quarters. Earlier that year we’d played a gig in Huddersfield where the landlord, a hefty man of a certain age, turned purple with mirth, pointing at Mo’s vegetable birthing routine and shrieking “That bloke’s shitting celery!”
Sometimes I struggled to enjoy the gigs where things felt completely out of control. I understood there was no “wrong” and no “right” way of doing this thing, but I really liked the songs and wanted them to sound good. Sometimes, however, I had to accept that this wasn’t necessarily the most important thing. Music could be secondary to spectacle. Jer, Dawson’s singer, wrote in the tour diary after the Greenock show: “Rhodri looks unhappy, Steve is demented, the whole thing gathers momentum… I wonder how Mo puts up with the verbal and physical abuse.”
Somehow — I’ve no idea, because I had no involvement with the money side of things — we were able to afford to stay in a hotel in Greenock after the show. A bed! When we awoke in the morning, we drove to a house in nearby Gourock where Davy (promoter) and his mum (his mum) lived. She provided us with copious quantities of food, and we stuffed our faces. The kindness bestowed upon us by strangers never ceased to amaze me. If we got stuck in a town with nowhere to sleep, someone would usually offer to put us up and feed us, massively inconveniencing themselves for no other reason than they liked us (or felt sorry for us). Once, in Brno in the Czech Republic, we were sitting in a restaurant, eating the small amount of food we could afford, when a couple sitting at the next table got some canned meat out of their shopping bags and offered it to us for free. Perhaps we looked as if we needed a break. There was probably a good reason for that.
Someone, I’m not sure who, now wrote a short poem in the tour diary: “The van has gone from bad to worse / That’s because it’s a fucking hearse.” It was at this point, four gigs in, when Pregnant Neck began to make noises about going home. These noises would increase in volume over subsequent days. (NB: Anthony notes in the diary: “I did not and do not want to go home.”) To compound matters, the Saturday night show in Dundee was cancelled, which further dampened whatever little enthusiasm they had left. But unfortunately for Pregnant Neck, there wasn’t enough money to get them home on the train, so they were stuck on a Luton van-shaped rollercoaster. And given that they were here, they may as well do the gigs. The show must go on, right?
Sunday 2nd September 1990: Perth Bianco’s
Monday 3rd September 1990: Kilmarnock Fagin’s
The re-appearance of The Ex to headline the Perth show lifted spirits somewhat, although Pregnant Neck’s couldn’t have been much lower. Mo records in the diary: “PN, overcoming their trials and tribulations, produced a short, curly and biscuity set.” It’s interesting, in retrospect, that he referred to “their” tribulations rather than “ours”, but essentially, Keatons folk didn’t seem to mind the situation we found ourselves in, while Neck folk did. (Except Anthony, who remained in good humour.)
“My costume needs a good wash,” Mo continues, “and is beginning to smell rather like a lizard skin that I once kept in a jar for three months… Keatons set was not bad but not brilliant. After about three minutes I was too hot to amuse either the crowd or myself, but I still managed to make a terrific mess.”
The next morning, the plan was to travel to the next show, Kilmarnock, via Glasgow. We made this more difficult than it should have been by making an elementary mistake: loitering around the van on a main thoroughfare and waiting for a suitable moment to climb in, in a way that made us look as guilty as fuck. The local police drove past twice, looking very interested in what we were or were not doing. After much deliberation, the decision was made to pre-empt the actions of the cops and send the legal limit of people to Kilmarnock in the van — i.e. three — while the rest of us travelled by coach “for the princely sum of £3.75 each,” as the diary notes. For many of our touring party, this was the first real view we’d had of Scotland. Dunblane Cathedral, Stirling Castle. Rivers. Trees!
Everyone arrived in Kilmarnock at 7pm. Steve describes it in the diary thus: “Rain, desperation and porridge. The venue looks like Clare Grogan’s living room.” [NB: this is a good thing in Steve’s book.] “I am happy and drink five cans of cheap Scottish lager,” he continues. Once again, however, a wet Monday evening failed to deliver much of an audience. This posed the almost philosophical question of whether that really mattered. Up-and-coming bands yearn for big audiences, but often the number of people present just masks the fact that most of them couldn’t give a shit about your ghastly music. However, if just one person thinks you’re amazing, in some sense that’s the job done (although evidently you won’t sell much merchandise.) If an audience is big, you can go through the motions and pretend it was great. If there’s barely anyone there, you’re forced to confront reality. And in Kilmarnock, reality was confronted. We coped OK. I remember Mo chasing someone around the room with a toothbrush.
Afterwards, I was delighted to be asked for my autograph. The girl who asked me only had one other autograph in her book, a man called Sidney Devine, who I’d never heard of. (Today, of course, I can quickly refer to Wikipedia and discover that he is “Scotland’s most successful crooner” who is an “ever-present part of the Scottish entertainment industry”, which is more than can be said for me.) Pregnant Neck played last, after Dawson and The Keatons, and between us we managed to pretty much clear the venue of punters by the time the night was over. Afterwards, Pregnant Neck asked for an allowance from meagre tour funds to hire a car for the journey to Inverness, because it was a bloody long way. Their wish was granted. But Inverness would be Pregnant Neck’s last ever gig.
Tuesday 4th September 1990: Inverness Hayloft
Paul drew a short cartoon in the diary to commemorate the hiring of the car. It wasn’t the most optimistic of artworks.
Pregnant Neck, minus one member (Anthony) plus one Keaton (Warren) were assigned to the car. Even though it was four humans lighter, the Luton van was still a sluggish, unpredictable beast, so we set off about three hours before the car did. Fifteen miles outside Inverness, sure enough, the van died. We had to wait an hour for the AA to arrive. They took a look and towed us into town for repairs, unaware of the full extent of the van’s human contents.
“This is the last gig we’re doing, so we’d better make it a good one,” announced Paul at the beginning of their set. After experiencing the relative luxury of a Vauxhall Astra, or whatever, there was no way they were getting back in that big red box, and as the budget didn’t permit more than a couple of days car hire, that was that. Anthony was upset. He had no intention of returning to Essex with them, and made his feelings known by lying down on the stage for the first three songs. Eventually, the intensity of the situation flicked a switch in his head, and he decided to enjoy himself, getting to his feet and, as we say in show business, “going for it”. The crowd began to show some appreciation, although owing to the peculiar construction of the venue, people who wanted to dance about had to do so in an adjoining room from where you couldn’t actually see the band. The final song they played was “Cake”, featuring Paul making some improbably large leaps into the air. Preggers Play Pop! It was probably their best gig on the whole tour. At the end of the night, to show there were no hard feelings, both bands assembled onstage and powered through impromptu versions of “Rowche Rumble” and “Psychomafia” by The Fall. The goths of Inverness seemed to like it.
In the morning, I awoke to find that Lee, Simon W and Paul had driven off in the car, back to Essex. And there were, in fact, plenty of hard feelings. In the diary, they used an entire page to commemorate their departure. It read, in part:
Hero Worship. Arrogance. Selfishness. Posing. Snidery. Everyone’s the same. Consideration for others from the outset is all that was needed. Oh well, that’s your problem. You’ll learn, someday. Maybe. Who cares?
It’s strange, reading that today. At the time, I thought that they were being difficult arseholes. I was probably the person who scribbled all over that page of the diary in annoyance. But maybe they were right. Maybe it was wrong of us to assume that other people would have our tolerance for, even appetite for, arduous and seemingly pointless escapades. The whole point of The Keatons endeavour was to make things happen, regardless of the financial and personal cost. Expending huge amounts of effort for precious little reward came with the territory. There was even something slightly addictive about it. It felt like a noble pursuit, and part of me is still driven by that impulse today. But to expect Pregnant Neck to buy into it was almost certainly unfair. I feel bad about it.
Warren was certainly pissed off, as his mates had gone home. “This guy’s got the right to say how he feels,” he wrote in the diary next to the farewell message, “so why all the graffiti?” He then drew an arrow pointing at the word “graffiti” and annotated it with “probably spelt wrong”, which just made me laugh out loud.
Wednesday 5th — Saturday 8th September 1990: The long road home
Our appetite for writing in the tour diary had evaporated by this point, so I’m having to look at my own diary for memory joggers. The gig at Stirling Boys Club, featuring us, Dawson and a band called Jerry Krishna (of whom I remember nothing) just has the line “I leapfrogged to Dawson”. (Presumably with the help of somebody else.) After the show, while manoeuvring the van out of a tight space at a petrol station, someone drove rather too near a protruding girder from a CCTV camera and succeeded in tearing a neat, 5cm-wide strip out of the top right hand side of the van. It was rather like opening a can of corned beef. I still remember the noise made by Richie, Dawson’s drummer, as the metal bar poked through within inches of his head. Mo had some gaffer tape that was almost the same colour as the van, so he patched it up. A few months later, we saw the same Hattons van driving around London with the side STILL patched up with Mo’s tape. Cheapskates!
Exiting Scotland, we made our way to Newcastle, where our gig was cancelled, but we managed to blag our way onto the bill at a venue called Joe Wilson’s, which I noted as being “the size of a small cupboard”. Then to York, where the debacle reached new and exciting levels. The Keatons had played a great gig there six months previously with some friends of ours, a band called Thrilled Skinny. Steve had rung the venue, the Spotted Cow, to ask if we could play again, but owing to a combination of crossed lines and Chinese whispers, we arrived at the Spotted Cow to find that the show that night — i.e. The Keatons + Dawson — was billed on the poster as “Phil Skinny”. Phil Skinny! Oh, man. With no local promoter to drum up interest, this meant that we were depending on the citizens of York to turn up and watch someone they’d never heard of, and who didn’t actually exist, by the name of Phil Skinny. This seemed unlikely.
We set up, soundchecked, sat and waited. Sure enough, by 9pm no one had showed up. We (i.e. Keatons) may have suggested that we play anyway, just the two bands performing to each other, you know, just for something to do, but Dawson wouldn’t have been keen, and frankly who could blame them. We made the almost unheard of decision to cancel the gig, and packed all the gear away. The moment we put the last guitar back in the Luton van, some dreadlocked guy turned up having hitchhiked all the way from Scarborough to see us play. We felt terrible, but not so terrible that we were prepared to set everything up again. To that person, if you’re reading this, we’re sorry. If you’d arrived 20 minutes earlier, we’d have done the gig. One person is plenty.
The last show was at The Adelphi in Hull. Everyone was tired. It had been two weeks of chaos, argument and resentment, but also, as ever, laughter in abundance and the wonderful opportunity to do our thing (whatever that was, exactly) in front of real live human beings, however few of them there were. But mid-set, I’d had enough. I kept breaking guitar strings, Mo was hindering my attempts to put on new ones, the noise was cacophonous and the audience didn’t seem interested. As the set ended, I remember slinging my guitar down on the floor in a strop and leaving the building on my own, through a fire exit into the car park. I remember sitting down on the floor and being close to tears. In such moments — and there were a few of them over those Keatons years — I wondered if a more tedious, humdrum existence would be preferable. But as I sat there, despondent and miserable, I heard three guys leaving the building from the front entrance and running down the road. “Fucking HELL,” shouted one of them. “WHAT a gig!”
That moment, my last memory of that tour, provided me with a small life lesson. I think about it quite often. Whatever you might think about the music you’re playing, or indeed any other art you’re making, other people will never see it through the same lens. They can’t. As a result, they could end up being affected by it in ways you could never imagine. Something you might think is of sub-standard quality, or even a bit shit, they might think is magical. And here’s the thing: who’s to say they’re not right?
The Keatons would go on to do 300 more gigs over the next five years, all rich with incident. I left in 1995 after a tour of Germany that ended with us playing in an empty field outside the town of Jena. I’ve been in a dozen or more bands since, but nothing as intense, joyful and liberating as The Keatons.
Steve and Mo continued with the band for a few more years, with a different line-up and sound. Steve now lives somewhere in Scotland. He made many amazing things happen, and I’ll be forever grateful to him. Mo now lives in Plymouth, performs with The Spoils Collective and still produces work under the name The Keatons. An astonishingly creative human being.
Simon K continued his day job of running a reptile shop in North London. He sadly died in 2013, after chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment for cancer.
I don’t know what happened to Warren.
Anthony went on to form Collapsed Lung and latterly Arndales — both brilliant bands — and now does exceptional music production work. He just sent me a note saying “I wonder what would have happened if Hattons had actually had a minibus?”
Nik ended up marrying my ex-wife. They’re still together! Funny old world.
Years later, I unexpectedly saw Paul from Pregnant Neck in an episode of the comedy show Look Around You. Lee, a brilliant, unique musician, tragically took his own life a few months after our Scottish tour ended.