The Curse Of Voon: Intermission

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There now follows a gap of just over a year, during which many things happened which were never recorded or photographed. I'll try and discuss them as briefly as possible.

With Voon back to a two-piece we retreated to the studio. Well, we sat around in my room smoking jazz fags and writing songs about Surfing Monsters, but there was a 4-track in the room, so it still counts. Neil had gone back to Essex and I was on the dole in Leicester. He'd come to the Midlands on a Thursday night, we'd go to the pub, then spend all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday in my room recording. It got a bit weird in the end - I particularly remember one afternoon with us stood on either side of the room beating sheets of metal arythmically with old pipes while screaming "Hilary's boyfriend's brains exploded" at the top of our voices and not thinking it unusual. This might be explained by the fact that when I eventually left that house the gas board came round and cordoned off my room - there was a massive gas leak in there. It was smart, just like ET, with loads of official tape all over saying "DANGER! Danger of DEATH by Poisoning or Explosion!"

Cool.

Out of all this came the album "Modern and Vivid", which is 80 minutes long and bloody brilliant, give me a tape and I'll copy it for you, go on. Unfortunately, such was the studio wizardry involved, we could never hope to recreate the soundscapes created when we returned to the live arena, so one day we asked Simon to join as a keyboard player. He didn't own a keyboard, in fact he'd never been anywhere near one in his life, but he was staying in the loft, so at least he was handy.

A week after this Simon did his first gig, supporting John Otway in front of one of our largest ever audiences. The next day he played his second, as part of an equipment promotion in a music shop (I think the idea was that people got so pissed off with our inability to play the expensive instruments that they'd be impelled to buy them, just so that we'd have to stop), and the day after that we went to Peterborough to play his third. After about a week he stopped shaking, and by the end of a fortnight he was able to speak again.

Thus was the new look Voon up and running! We played many many gigs! We travelled! Travelling was brilliant. We played in London several times, and though we always got there without any trouble, something always went awry on the way back, largely because Neil and I were catatonically drunk and could hardly manage to get into the car, let alone out of London, and Si seemed to think he could drive better without his glasses. How we laughed as I innocently asked how many rivers there were in London, as we seemed to have crossed at least two already and look, there's the houses of Parliament! Again!

We supported Seefeel one night, who had pedals and a lightshow. "Can you turn the lights off so we can see the film please?" they asked. "Oh, can you turn the lights on so we can see our guitar pedals please? Oh. Can you turn the lights off so ..." we laughed ourselves silly, as they talked to somebody from Too Pure, and got signed up just as we were circling the Brixton Fridge for the third time.

We played with a band in Kennington who had a song called "Don't Sleep With My Friends", which was good advice considering the state of their friends. When we arrived the promoter said "Sorry the PA's not ready lads. I'll buy you a drink to say sorry." He was impressed that we were being Northern and drinking bitter, but not so impressed to find that the cost of the round was more than the ticket proceeds we'd generated (the other band's list of tickets sold was a mass of ticks and crosses, names and promises, while ours simply said "Trevor"). The audience was terrified of us ("Are we too punk and Northern for you?" I bellowed, as Simon [Basingstoke] and Neil [London] goggled) and they ran away when we went to the bar. Me and Si told Neil that the ladies' toilet was the dressing room, but he asked me not to mention that.

We booked a gig at Hampstead's prestigious White Horse. It was only as we left to go home that we realised we'd just played the rather less prestigious Brixton White Horse instead.

In Northampton we played a Battle of the Bands with a sixth-form band called Journey Into Gingerbread, whose lead singer, a pony-tailed little troll, asked me "Are you a rock and roller?" "No", I replied, "I'm Anneka Rice." He didn't come near us again all night, which was nice. It was an excellent gig, one of the best we ever did - the promoter loved us (he wore an "I like Voon" sticker when he announced the results, and later tried to organise an "International Festival of Voon" all day tribute concert - really), the audience loved us too and mobbed us as we came offstage (most of them were women! they tried to snog us! it was the only time this ever happened!), but we still didn't win. Oh well.

Northampton was another of the early manifestations of The Curse of Voon. We were supposed to play the Roadmender, but the gig was moved because of "mysterious arson threats". A little while later another venue went bankrupt a week before we were meant to play, another got it's PA stolen the night before, and yet another had it's performance licence cancelled mere hours before we went on. I soon learnt that stories like this could be of some use for getting us in the paper, and I may perhaps have started to exaggerate a little. For instance, when we played Peterborough I nearly broke a lead, but by the time we got back to Leicester this had become thousands of pounds worth of explosives accidentally going off mid-set, destroying our equipment, half the venue, and putting most of the audience in hospital. Poetic licence. Local papers are great, sod all happens so they'll believe any old crap, and we were soon regular Figures Of Doom in the weekly music pages. Weirdly, it started to become true. For instance, one night we played the University, and the soundman laughed "Ho! We'd better watch out for the Curse of Voon, eh lads?" He wasn't laughing an hour later, as Simon tried to fix his keyboards with sticky tape while the drum machine pre-empted jungle and my guitar snapped in two as I drunkenly fell into the PA.

And from then on there was to be no stopping the lies, all the terrible lies. Simon had to miss a couple of gigs to take his final exams, and it was pointed out to me one night that this was not awfully Rock and Roll. I was just pondering this when Tim The Celebrity Drummer Out Of Prolapse (in pre-Endsleigh League Indie Band Megastardom SellOut days) came over for a chat.

"Why-aye canny lad," he said, "where's canny wee Simon then, like?"

I thought a moment, and said "Oh, he's in prison."

Hastily, I told Neil what I'd said, so he cornered Tim for half an hour and told him all about the incident (a bungled burglary, eerily predating similar troubles the Charlatans would have a year later with their keyboard player - spooky eh?), the trial and the thoroughly unjust three month sentence he was serving. By the end of the week the whole of the Crap Leicester Indie Band scene was up in arms about the Basingstoke One, and Simon was thoroughly disgusted by the whole thing. "How could you?" he would weep, as he swept out of the kitchen dramatically.

After his last exam we were in the pub celebrating, when Prolapse walked in. They saw Simon and cowered. After a discussion on the other side of the room Geordie Mick drew the short straw, and approached Simon, who was seething with rage at what we'd done. "I will tell them the truth!" he declared.

"Why-aye canny lad," said Mick. "You're a bit of a hero round here like. What was it like, in prison, like?"

"In prison?" said Simon. "Oh, it wasn't too bad really. To be honest we played football most of the time."

From then on we went wild. People would pat him on the back in a spirit of solidarity, and be prepared to believe that we'd had to spend a weekend in Australia recording a single, asking for months when they could expect to get it on import. We sent some "I like Voon" stickers to the Melody Maker, who covered their offices with them, rechristened the gossip column "the column that likes Voon", and put "How Voon Is Now" as one of their top ten songs for Christmas. The fact that there was no such song (at that point) didn't stop us from telling everybody that this was actually an early import of our big Australian hit.

The best of all the lies, however, was the beginning of our other bid for notoriety. A magazine called CLAG had started locally, and was about as good as its name would suggest. It was run by the usual bunch of fat old folk singers and unreconstructed rockers, middle aged men with pony tails and sweat rings, who once reviewed Del Amitri (not exactly underground hipsters) thus: "Mr Amitri has a pleasant voice, but mention must go to his band, who display great musical proficiency and can really kick arse." They'd already printed a good review of us (written by me, as it happens) and so decided to send someone to review a gig. The resulting article filled an entire page. It was an "hilarious" piss-take, comparing us to Abba, the Beatles and the Bay City Rollers, claiming we were the greatest band ever, before, with amazing comedic timing, revealing in the last sentence they we were actually shit.

They obviously had no idea who they were messing with. Other bands who had been slagged off had sent whinging letters, then split up in terror, but we decided to take the whole ghastly aging rocker scene on. Part of the review was an interview with our drum machine - I know, priceless isn't it? I went into their offices one afternoon after work to hand in a friendly, jokey letter (Ha!), and gave The Performance Of A Lifetime. "I know you weren't to know," I sniffed," but the thing is, the reason we used a drum machine that night is ... I'm sorry, I'm fine, it's just that ... well, our drummer had been killed in a car crash the night before. You weren't to know, but obviously if you really had spoken to us ... well, I just thought you should know, in case anybody said anything. I think it's what he would have wanted." There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

The next issue of the magazine carried a full page of letters from irate Voon fans, some sticking up for us, my own "jokey" letter, a few criticising the general muso-slant of the magazine, and a couple drawing attention to the sad circumstances before the gig. They printed a quarter page apology to the band, their friends and family, which ended by saying "Voon should carry on with what they're doing - they certainly have a lot of fans!"

No, we just had a lot of stamps.

And that was just the start - after that every monthly issue had more and more about how terrible we were, debate raged in the venues and rehearsal rooms of the city, audiences reached double figures as people came to see what all the fuss was about, and when I took posters round shops people would say, "Are you in Voon then? I've been reading all about you." It was wonderful. We deliberately wound them up by slagging off all the other Leicester bands in everything we sent to the local paper (which it merrily printed), and every time they gave us a bad review we'd put it on our posters, along with our recommendation from the Melody Maker, and quotes from John Otway ("Voon are great") and Lenny Kravitz ("I like Voon"). Unusually for us these were entirely genuine - I bought Otway's (brilliant) book and Lenny Kravitz's album (it was the early nineties, as I may have mentioned, and all sorts of things seemed like good ideas) and demanded that they sign them thus. "What's with this crazy Voon shit, man?" demanded Kravitz. At the same signing someone asked him how it felt to sell out - "Sell out? SELL OUT? No way man! No way do I sell out" he raged, before an aide pointed out that they'd meant he'd sold all the tickets for his gig that night.

To this day members of the old CLAG editorial committee quake in fear as we approach.

Anyway, on the crest of this particular wave we returned to the studio (well, the spare room at the back really) to begin work on our next tape, "Interesting", which is where we resume our story.

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