It was like this. As a number of you probably know, I’m involved with the Swiss Concrete music promoting ‘organization’ (no links in this post I’m afraid – I’m writing it from work and they’ve blocked MySpace. Do a search if you’re really interested. They’re also detecting porn on this very blog, which comes as a surprise to me . . .). Last Friday’s gig included a London band called You & Me, who had played for us before. They had managed to secure this second gig by completing a challenge to make up thirty cheese based bands or acts (Stilton John, Edam and the Ants, you get the idea). In reply to this they offered us, the promoters, a gig if we could create a string of thirty bands (we started with The The, then went to The Fall, then Fall Out Boy and, well, you get the idea). We managed to do this before the night was out. So now we have a gig. Some time in November. Somewhere near Leicester Square.
This throws up several points of interest. The foremost of these is probably the fact that none of the four of us can really play an instrument. Admittedly regular correspondent Dick Gappy can play a mean kazoo and has a cracking pair of lungs on him, but as far as the rest of us go, there’s not much musical proficiency going on. As I’m sure I’ve banged on about in the past, I did do occasional guest shouting for a friend’s band, but a decade’s heavy smoking later I doubt that i could recreate any of that. We are in the process of enlisting a musical svengali to hopefully provide some guidance, but the actual intricacies of what will be happening on that stage in a few months time is still rather up in the air. I’m sort of envisioning a bizzarre cabaret feel to the whole thing, but whether anyone else is prepared to allow me to premiere my burlesque routine is another matter (they are very big balloons, ladies . . .).
As well as how we’ll be performing, there’s also the question of what we’ll be performing. Covers would be far too easy and frankly against the spirit of the wager. Creating some kind of minimalist noise/drone piece would appeal to me (as they normally do), but again feels like a bit of a cop out. All that’s been composed that I currently know of is a presumably bawdy piece about being at one end of Cilla Black. There is presumably a fair bit of writing to be done. I might go through the archive here and see if there’s anything worth cannibalizing. Don’t think I’ve done any posts in verse, but I can just pretend it’s free and no one’ll notice. No one rhymes any more, man.
One thing that we do have is a name. That is Manlathe (as in ‘man’ and, err, ‘lathe’ – do you see?). The reason for this goes back to the thirty band list – we concluded that our group should be thirty-first on the list and should loop back around to the start again. I think that the thirtieth band was Zoot Woman, lathes had been a subject of discussion earlier in the night and Womanlathe sounds sexist if not worse, So Manlathe it is.
Next time – Well, I dunno. It hasn’t happened yet. I’m not chuffing psychic.
As I remember the 38 groover was a 60s record. I want to find out more about it too, but I can’t find it.