I finally make a proper record and vinyl euphoria ensues.

37 days 19 hours and 20 mins to go

Ten years after ‘A Portrait of Time, I finally got a release out that was a proper record, one that was heard on the radio and was available in the shops (in some at least). After I fell in love with punk at the tail end of 1976, I dragged my neglected guitar out from under my bed and dusted off my three chords. I then went in search of a band. Filling the bass spot was easy (well relatively easy, I did play with a few people for a year but we never had a drummer or got out of school halls).

After seeing the Ramones live at the Rainbow, New Year’s Eve 1977, along with my mate Colin Masters, I asked him, as we drove back from the gig, if he would be my bass player. He told me he had never even touched a bass (he lied, he had a bit) and I told him, you’re tall skinny and good looking; you’ll do perfect for a bass player. That settled, we looked for a drummer, but that was very hard, as all the drummers that were available wanted to play in the Eagles or do David Bowie material.

Finally we found Tig Barber who lived far too far away from us to make the process of rehearsing easy, but we put up with the journeying (we always had to go to him, he didn’t drive) because of the drought of stixmen. (ah yes, I remember it was in the time of ‘The drought of Stixmen’ when the dearth of unpretentious banging laid waste across the country. It was the time of the Great Percussion).

After a year or more of playing, I decided that we should form our own label and put a single out. So we created No Wonder Records (a nod to the then, very influential Small Wonder records), then, with the aid of  some money borrowed from Tiggy’s Dad, we pressed up a 1200 copies and headed off to London to press one into the hands of John Peel. We hung around outside Broadcasting House waiting for him to come back from lunch, I don’t remember seeing him, I don’t remember why not, but I seemed to remember handing a copy in to reception to be passed on to him.

A few nights later, during a break in rehearsals, standing in Tig’s kitchen, talking loudly to compete with the radio swalking out the John Peel show in the background. It seemed that someone had dropped a stylus onto our single, on a record player that we knew didn’t exist in the kitchen.

After a few, short, sweet moments of disorientation had passed, we realised our music was coming out of the radio, on John Peel’s show and was reaching every corner of the United Kingdom, in real time, as we stood there! To the accompanying sounds of euphoria filling the kitchen, had come the opening riff of our single, our music, my song. It was called Hypocrite and personally, 

I would never be the same again. 

I would always be Neurotic. 

Below is what we heard.