The Curse Of Voon: 1990-1992

< previous

next>

MORGUE DANCING

(sometime in 1990, 41 Paton Street, Leicester)

Strictly speaking, this track is pre-Voon. It was recorded in the living room of the house I shared with Neil. The day before this we'd wandered down Narborough Road and bought a bass guitar. We spent that night learning "Freak Scene" (it was the early nineties, so there wasn't much else to learn) and the next day making this song up. The backing vocals are by Gaynor, who lived there too but mercifully declined to become involved in the whole thing any further. She's now got a good job, her own house, and is about to get married. Neil and I have a lot of anecdotes about being in a band.

DOMESTIC BLISS

(a few weeks later, 41 Paton Street, Leicester)

This is the song that made me want to be in a band - I was so proud when we eventually managed to play it all the way through. Bless. We were going to be called "The Ali Bongo Band", but that was obviously too silly, so we chose Voon instead. It was a word that Neil kept writing in the snow (i.e. it thus "came to us in a dream"), but we later found it in all sorts of strange second-hand bookshop sci-fi novels that he kept buying. Spooky eh?

RATHER SPOOKY

SHE'S A SPACEMAN

(11th March 1991, The Spreadeagle, Leicester)

Our first gig! Luckily I knew the promoter of a local comedy club, the Casbah (me) so we arranged ourselves this spot. We were meant to do Domestic Bliss, but Neil refused - it's very strange listening to all these live tapes, as most of the talking is by me. Neil was terrified of talking - I once sat him down for a Serious Chat about how he really ought to say a few words between songs. Now there's no shutting him up.

DECAPITATED BLUES

STREETS OF LONDON

(20th April 1991, The Spreadeagle, Leicester)

Our second gig! This time we did loads of songs, but most of them were crap. At the time I couldn't see how other people could think we were anything but brilliant, but I suppose it does take a bit of looking for. Listening to the tapes now there's parts where I can't decide whether it really is crap after all, or simply years ahead of it's time - I prefer to think the latter. Anyway, "Decapitated Blues", like "Rather Spooky", was a heavily re-worked version of a song by my band from school, The Masters of Nothing, and "Streets of London" was about 25% of the songs Neil could play from start to finish.

PILCHARDS OF DEATH

(sometime in the summer of 1991, 40 Brazil Street, Leicester)

After our first couple of gigs we recorded a demo, "Yoghurt Flange", on my friend Chris's 4-track. It was great. Unfortunately we proceeded to have a big row and split up, so we never had the indignity of failing to sell any. Most bands do this sort of thing - play two or three gigs to their mates, have EITHER a big row OR a terrible gig, then never play again. The key to the success of Voon was that we had THOUSANDS of rows and MILLIONS of bloody awful gigs that nobody came to, and kept going. We charted new territory in what happens when a band nobody likes keeps going against universal indifference through sheer bloody mindedness. We reveled in people hating us, and dreamt of the day when there'd be no-one left in the room when we finished our set. Every time a new fashion appeared in the music press we'd say "This is it! At last they've finally caught up with us! We'll be signed at the next gig and be famous!" Stupidly, Voon finally shuddered to a halt mere seconds before Britpop happened, when useless bands were getting on Top of the Pops all over the shop.

Anyway, the point of all the above is that this is the song that set us going again - I was staying at Brazil Street, Neil came for the weekend, and Chris went out, so we crept into his room and pissed around with his stuff for a couple of hours. In these little ways is history made.

SANTA IS COMING

(November-ish 1991, 40 Brazil Street, Leicester)

The first outsider to become embroiled in the world of Voon was George, but he was a hippy who couldn't play guitar and never got past the first practice, so he need concern us no further. The first extra member proper was Dave the Robot. He was a rum cove. He used to chuck away his loose change because it was making his pockets messy, would say "It's David, actually", and played his one and only gig with gaffa tape over his nipples. All this, and he still refused point blank to cover his face in silver foil, wear white gloves and body pop, no matter how much we pleaded.

This song was written as an attempt to see why Indie Guitar bands never released Christmas singles, and I think we found out. It's also the first glimmerings of our synth-driven dance leanings, which were to make so little impact on our sound over the years.

VIBRATOR

GET BACK

TREVOR AND SARAH

(9th December 1991, Spreadeagle, Leicester)

Of course, once you've got a synth player in your sonic noise terrorist guitar band, the next logical step is to get a clarinet player, and luckily I knew one. And that's the ONLY reason I asked her to join the band, no, really. Jane was a friend off my course who did some folk singing, which obviously made her even more suitable for Voon. She too only played this one gig, which was videoed by some art student, so that in the end we got 3 seconds of us setting up and half an hour of a strobe light. Arty. A few weeks after this gig Neil played me a Dinosaur Jr song which he'd ripped Vibrator off. Strangely, this sudden realisation of things did not extend so far as to make me see how chronically bad my singing on "Trevor and Sarah" was. I thought it was really good.

BABY DON'T LEAVE ME

WHITE RABBIT

ASK

CHILD OF THE MOON

(1st March 1992, Cellar Bar, Leicester)

Another new line-up, as Dave and Jane left, making way for Aiden the drummer. Aiden was great, but he was never really meant to be a drummer as he was allergic to alcohol and had arthritis in his wrists. He played this gig after being in the band two days, and found it all a bit bemusing as he'd only previously played with blues covers bands, but he threw himself into it with enthusiasm and, uniquely for Voon, technical know-how. He also shagged a lot. Neil and I would turn up for rehearsals to find him sprawled on the floor saying "No fast ones today lads, too much shagging." We worshipped him. Another time, as we set off for a gig in his car (he had a car!) some fool, who was in no way me, quipped "Oh no! What about all the groupies? We've forgotten the condoms!" "Sod that", said Aiden, "We're not a charity."

Wow.

As mentioned, he was only in the band for two days before this gig, and we did an hour long set. During "Ask" several people left in disgust - in fact, if you listen carefully, on almost every live track you can hear either me or Neil saying "Bye" as we performed our famous pub clearing act. "Baby Don't Leave Me" was another Masters of Nothing Song, we'd learnt "White Rabbit" when we provided incidental music for a production of "Alice in Wonderland" (which sounds a lot more bohemian than it actually was), and there were loads of dodgy Stones covers on the go that year.

Aiden stuck around for quite a while, including the time that Jamie joined the band, making us a proper four-piece like The Beatles! Sadly this didn't last very long, there's no photographs, and the only tape of this line-up was destroyed by a support band who had got us banned from a pub for drinking all the free beer we'd been promised. Aiden ended up being one of the first victims of the Curse of Voon - on the day of one particular gig he had to pick his car up from the garage, collect his drum kit, and have an interview about his future with his course leader. The course was in Leicester, the drums in Luton and the garage in Bedford. He had the interview, cycled to the railway station, caught the train to Luton (with 1 minute to spare), was picked up by his dad, drove to the garage (3 minutes before it closed), got his car, moved his drums into it from his dad's car, and set off to Leicester, only to have his gearbox explode halfway there.

We hardly ever saw him again after that. He had learnt well.

SPACEMAN 9

(Spring 1992, 40 Brazil Street, Leicester)

Suddenly we were back to a two-piece. We were bored, Chris was out of the house, and so we snuck in his room and pissed about with his stuff again. We were to do this quite a lot over the coming months.

< previous

next>