What I was alive for

15: Smart Dress Only (live)

Recorded July 2002, live at the Flapper & Firkin, Birmingham
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Richard Banner (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer n/a (live recording taken by Alan Farmer)
Released Effortless cd album January 2004


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Where do all the lost songs go? Because the ones that actually get recorded, so that you can listen to them after the band has gone – those are a tiny minority of all the songs that are written. And when a song is written and performed by a band but never recorded, and then the band splits up and the song's never played again, that song can't just disappear forever. It has to go somewhere. It has to. Somewhere in the stars, in some teeming hypothetical dimension, there’s an ethereal record shop that stocks every lost song ever written.

They've got a Regulars CD, of course. The final track is a brilliant song called 'Don't Refuse Me': an intense, slow-burning 4am vision thing, which Paul wrote most of the music for. There are a couple more fabulous tunes we were working on at the time of the split, which never got as far as having titles, one of which would've been our best song of all, a beautiful soft sparkling jangly shower of hope and sadness, with me playing harmonica on it! And there's 'They Built Over The Traino', a shouty, spiky, 90-second thrash lamenting the construction of Peaks Parkway over a section of the former East Lincolnshire Railway – yeah, that old chestnut – which we improvised at a practice in April 1998 when I was still drunk after the Mariners won the Football League Trophy at Wembley the day before. The first 100 copies of the CD also feature our cover versions of 'Matthew and Son', 'Back in the USSR' and the theme music from Channel 4 News.

Were it not for a few ropey live recordings of The Regulars, a few more of our songs would have been consigned to the lost record shop in the stars. 'Smart Dress Only' is one. And as ropey live recordings of The Regulars go, this one rests towards the slightly less ropey end; hence its appearance on Effortless. That and the fact that it said something that mattered to the small but passionate knot of fans who applauded us through the UK's indiepop dark ages and were there at the Flapper & Firkin in July 2002 when Alan Farmer from Bearos Records switched on his minidisc player and recorded the live set this track appeared in.


One of the problems I had with Birmingham was its vast preponderance of pretentious bars and shit townie troughs at the expense of decent pubs. Both tend to operate strict dress codes: the absurd 'Jam House' at St Paul’s Square once refused to let my trainer-clad girlfriend back in to join her mates after she'd just stepped out to make a phone call. And I don't understand how dress codes, as a kind of blatant cultural discrimination, are even legal.

These days, of course, I would never dream of going near one of those places, but in Birmingham the only alternative was staying in, and I would also struggle to understand why people put up with being treated with utter contempt by an organisation they are giving money to. Even when you get let in at one of these places, you're still herded around and scowled at by the bouncers and generally regarded as something less than human.

Other cities have their strips of shit bars but manage to retain good pubs as well. Birmingham had its townie hell in Broad Street (and still does) but failed grandly on the latter score. And me and that small passionate knot of Regulars fans, we felt the effects of all this. Because there was nowhere for us to go, and everywhere was being either tarted up for the >£30k-a-year bosses who made our lives hell at work all day or marketed down for thick-necked thugs who snarled at us and in gangs chanted "Student scum!" at us in the street (years after we finished university, of course). Places like the Ship Ashore – our places – were being demolished and places for these people were replacing them. And they somehow seemed strengthened by this. It validated them and diminished us. It informed the aggression in their swagger. It supercharged their snarl.


So what do you think of the music? It's one of those where Rob wrote all the guitar stuff and I just chipped in the melody. After a really excellent, tense, restrainedly rumbustious verse and pre-chorus, I reckon the chorus lets it down a bit, gets messy with the two vocals doing different stuff. But I like the brevity of it all, the way each verse is only eight bars long, the way it just stops, comfortably short of three minutes. Rob's abrasive guitar riff (in as much as you can hear it on this recording) finds just the right tone of menace and neon paranoia. The whole thing has quite a Smiths-like feel, I think: partly the urban (with a small 'u') diceyness of the subject matter, partly the guitars, partly that it's the same shuffling 12/8 rhythm used in 'Panic' and 'Sheila Take a Bow'.

The first time we played 'Smart Dress Only' live was at the Flapper & Firkin in November 2001 – which was probably when the Regs were at the height of our popularity. You know when you go to a gig and the promoter sometimes asks you on the door which band you've come to see? They used to do that at the Flapper, and that night 65 people said they'd come to see The Regulars and we got paid over a hundred quid! More importantly, for the first time, I was playing around a bit with how we looked and what we did on stage. We opened with 'Today at Last', which (as you'll find out in a couple of weeks) has a long instrumental at the start, and I sat off stage until just before the vocals began, which gave rise to one of my favourite moments in The Regulars: I was barefoot, with a blue silk shirt on, wearing a hairclip, and glitter on my face, and the packed and sweaty Flapper let loose a big old cheer when I walked on stage to start singing. Sweet!


These moments were rare, of course. But they were intense. That small passionate knot of fans were few and nearly all local, but they cared enough for a group of them to adopt the name 'the Irregulars' and dress up as Audrey Hepburn at the Jug of Ale one night, and we experienced regular stage invasions (as much as the indiepop movement in 2009 is vastly more exciting than what we had then, you have to be physically collared by Pocketbooks for anything like that to happen now). Sometimes there actually was a lot of love in that room.

And here's a thing that illustrates all of that. One Saturday night in July 2005 – a year after I moved away from Birmingham, and nearly three years after the band split up – thousands of people were evacuated from the Broad Street area after a bomb alert. The scant smattering of applause at the end of this track betrays a typically indifferent response to The Regulars, but the little flurry of jocular text messages I received from Birmingham that night asking if I'd planted the bomb suggested that, if the song had only made a small impression, at least it was a lasting one.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
The first live performance of the song, as reported on the Regulars website
The evacuation of Broad Street reported by the BBC

posted by Pete Green @ 00:18