What I was alive for

09: Pop Box 9:30

Recorded December 2001, Smallwood Studios, Redditch, Worcs
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Richard Banner (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Mat Webster
Released GoJonnyGoGoGoGo compilation cd album February 2002; Effortless cd album January 2004

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence



After the end of Sarah Records in 1996, I made the mistake of believing that indiepop was finished. It could never happen now, but back in those parochial, pre-broadband days, it was easy to miss what was going on elsewhere in the world. Indiepop, in fact, was thriving in parts of mainland Europe and the USA – as I eventually discovered when Steve from Tempest Records in Birmingham persuaded me to buy Montecarlo, one of the finest and most cosmopolitan indiepop compilations ever released (get yourself a copy from somewhere, anywhere, if you can). And by 2001, when I wrote 'Pop Box 9:30', indiepop was starting to resurface in Britain as well.


It was partly the bands Alan Farmer was bringing to Birmingham for Bearos Records gigs: people like Saloon (pictured), MJ Hibbett and the Validators, and The Chemistry Experiment. But for the first time I was becoming able to see out there beyond the midlands. I was looking northwards to Sheffield, where I could dance to my favourite old indiepop bands at Offbeat and hear new ones and buy their records at Forever Changes the next day – discovering a section in their racks labelled 'new indiepop underground' was a turning point in my entire life – and to Leeds, where Jonny Ackroyd was starting up the Strangeways night and the GoJonnyGoGoGoGo all-dayers. And I was looking south to London, where there was a fantastic label called Track & Field which did an amazing all-dayer in Camden every Easter Sunday. The same names and faces were starting to crop up at both ends of the country: Airport Girl, Ballboy, Milky Wimpshake. The scene was inchoate, fragmented and tentative, but the dots were starting to join up, the connections to be made.

And my God, I was so in love with the Action Time album. For about 18 months I used to put 'Rock and Roll' on every mix tape I ever made anyone. Am I the only one who remembers them?

It was a breathtaking, exciting, horizon-widening time – the start of all the fulfilment and joy of the last couple of years – but a bleak chapter for me in other ways, because I was also having a total and absolute nightmare with stress at work making me ill and drink too much, and a lot of difficulty and loss in my personal life. The beginning of the UK indiepop resurgence is worth an article in itself, and some other time maybe I'll turn those last paragraphs into one. But I had to tell you about it now because that's where 'Pop Box 9:30' came from. I wanted us to make the sound of all those incredible nights I was starting to have; I wanted to tell Birmingham about what was starting to happen in other places. The song ended up including a lot of the dark background that these brief flashes of fantastic light were set against.

One way of getting through the working day, I figured, was to bring into it the best thing from outside. So when I got back from the (then) ace record shop Tempest one lunchtime with Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like a Peasant in my bag, I took the poster out of the sleeve and put it up on the wall. And then I started ordering loads and loads of indiepop records and CDs from Pennyblack Music and getting them delivered to my work address. So, at least one day a week, at half past nine in the morning, just as sleep was wearing off and the grim demands of the day beginning to bite, the post would be brought round to everyone's desk and, in among the marketing leaflets and the dreary press releases, there would be a little box of pop. A secret stash of bliss. An escape capsule.

Last week I talked about how the lyrics in 'It Isn't Him' worked quite well when you read them from the page but fell flat when I actually sang them. I realised this by the time I wrote 'Pop Box 9:30' and it's the other way round: the lyrics here look completely rubbish when they sit silently in black and white and were written entirely to sound good sung out loud. This despite my mispronunciation of "Aislers" when I'm banging on about The Aislers Set: we were still emerging from the UK's indiepop dark ages and I'd never met anyone else who'd even heard them, let alone had a conversation about them, so how was I to know the first 's' is silent?


I might not have known how to say their name but I couldn't stop listening to them. The Aislers Set (right) were the soaring highlight of the Track & Field all-dayers when they played in 2001 (I think the death of Joey Ramone happened either while they were playing or very nearly) and The Last Match is still one of my favourite handful of albums ever. The guitar riff I wrote to introduce and run through the verse in 'Pop Box 9:30' is a sort of homage, as they say, to the Aislers' 'Been Hiding'. Just as the lyrics were written to tell people about all the fantastic bands I was listening to, so was the music.

I don't know whether that worked or not, really. Everyone loved Saloon when they did a Bearos single, and everyone who came to see The Regulars would turn out to see Ballboy when I persuaded Jackie, Rob and Eddie who put the gigs on at the Flapper & Firkin that they should be worth a go (it never occurred to me to try DIY promoting, so I did a short stint as a go-between, asking proper promoters if they'd put on indiepop acts from other cities). But the punters didn't really follow it up by beating a path to Tempest the next day and demanding everything they'd got by The Starlets or the Wimpshake or The Blue Minkies.

The first time we played 'Pop Box 9:30' live was 15 September 2001. It was a short set on an outdoor stage in Chamberlain Square, as part of the annual Artsfest event promoted by Birmingham City Council. I was upstaged by a weird old geezer dancing a jig right in front of the stage. One other time when we played it in Birmingham, there were nods and smiles and whoops. The other times, I seem to remember giving it everything I had and being a bit deflated by the lack of response. Maybe it's just not that great a song. But it must have done something right to get played at England's coolest indiepop disco in 2008. Hee.

Three months after its first live airing we recorded 'Pop Box' in The Regulars' last studio session, with Mat Webster in Redditch: it was a heroic endeavour in attaining as rough and dirty a sound on the guitars as we possibly could. I wanted something that would make 'This is the Sound' sound like Abba. Mat showed us a beat-up little practice amp thrown into some forgotten corner of the studio. It was pretty good for getting a fuzzy, filthy, spluttering old sound, he said, and we could do what we liked to try and mess it up even more. So we all lined up and took turns to kick the shit out of it. I like the result and it shows how much better guitar effects can sound when they're not done digitally.

The samples right at the beginning and just before the end come from Glengarry Glen Ross. I asked my filmhead friend Simon Wilson if he knew any film quotes along the lines of "what are you gonna do – fire me?" and sure enough there was one that said exactly that, and we managed to find some clips on some web page. I just downloaded them as .wav files on to a floppy and gave it to Mat when we rolled up at the studio. I've never even seen the film, so I guess I really should watch it sometime. (I'd never seen Spinal Tap either when people used to ask me if that was where we'd got the name of The Regulars from.)

Yay for Chris's cowbell!

I wonder sometimes whether 'Pop Box 9:30' blew wide apart the narrow cracks in the band, like water freezing and expanding in a fissure through a rock. When Paul, Rich and Rob announced they were leaving to form The Will to Rally there was talk of wanting to do something "more rock". I always thought there were more than enough guitar solos and six-minute songs in The Regulars, but they were probably alienated at least as much by my banging on and on about pop in lyrics and interviews than by my actually writing pop songs.

And, while Paul was as zealous as me in knocking seven shades out of that knackered practice amp, Rob wasn't too pleased with the rough-arse sound, as it turned out. He never really said as much – that wouldn't have been his style – but he was glad at my odd decision to add the words 'demo version' to the title when it appeared on the CD that was compiled for the first GoJonnyGoGoGoGo all-dayer in Leeds in February 2002, when we played at that (picture below right, backstage just before we go on). I guess this was as vehement a criticism as anyone ever articulated in The Regulars.


GoJonnyGoGoGoGo seemed to me to widen those cracks in another way too, or at least to expose them. Rob went AWOL from the venue until dangerously near our stage time, looking round shops with his girlfriend rather than immersing in the nascent indiepop scene. For shame! At the end we had to leave after the bands but before the blessed DJs had finished – because someone or other "had to get back", for some reason or other – and I ran back from the exit to the dancefloor for one final joyful thrash to 'Deceptacon' before we consigned ourselves to the motorways back to the glum popless midlands. "What was that?" asked Rob when I got back, breathless and euphoric. I think it was pleasure rather than horror that had attended his first experience of Le Tigre, but I'd already danced to it a hundred times at Offbeat. Hadn't I told him about them already? We were slowly but clearly diverging.

There's an irony in all of this – a circularity which ends in paradox. I've been telling you how The Regulars were cheated by circumstance; that in a different city, at a different time, we could have been contenders. Not quite The Beatles, as Rob and I told each other we wanted to be in our feverish late nights of creativity and ale, early on in our partnership, but – I dunno... Camera Obscura, maybe – that sort of level. If only the indiepop scene had been then what it is now; then we'd have had not the world at our feet but certainly 6Music. But it was my headlong dash into the very beginnings of the new indiepop underground, perhaps, that ultimately split the band, forcing the issues that had stayed below the surface until then.

The fact that I'm sitting up at midnight on a Tuesday several years later typing up these thousands of words should tell you how much I loved being in The Regulars and how much these songs meant to me. I bear years of bitter regret that all the sweat and passion poured into these compositions was utterly wasted as The Regulars failed dismally to get beyond our own backyard. But fuck the lot of it. Because the indiepop movement we have in 2009 is way beyond anything I imagined possible back then. And if that loss was the price I paid to be a part of the indiepop movement we have in 2009 then it's the best deal I've ever made.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
'Rock and Roll' by The Action Time (mp3, 2.4mb)
'Been Hiding' by The Aislers Set on last.fm (streaming full track)
The first live performance of the song described on The Regulars' website
A review of Effortless on Pennyblack Music

posted by Pete Green @ 23:26