My ES250/2

I'd never much cared for motorbikes until I saw one of Joe's MZs. It was built from brand new parts and stood, never having seen oil nor petrol, in his living room. Red and black, it looked so cool that I decided then and there that it was my destiny to ride a bike just like it.

A while later, after having owned a smaller MZ for a couple of years, (the plan was to then pass my motorcyle driving test) I was sitting on the train to Milton Keynes in order to buy my new MZ ES250/2.

I was met at the station by a fat, taciturn biker. The bike had been standing for years but it seemed to ride just fine. I bought it for £400. As I say, I intended to pass my motorcycle driving test but had not yet at that moment. This meant that it was illegal for me to ride a 250cc bike but I planned only to take it back to Whitechapel and keep it there until everything was above board.

I was concerned that it had been standing for so long and I was concerned that I hadn't a valid driving licence nor insurance and the bike had no MOT certificate. The sky was a blanket of low grey clouds, stretching in all directions for as far as the eye could see, threatening rain. But how peculiar it was to ride the bike. It felt so different to the one that I was used to. And the headlamp shell was fixed which gave a strange impression, as though the handle bars were static.

It was the first time that I rode on a motorway, yet another thing that I was prohibited in doing without a full motorcycle licence, and the feel of the bike, the ominous clouds and the illegality of it all made me very uncomfortable. And then the engine started to sound odd. It sounded slightly scratchy and clunky and the noise grew worse. I knew that a two stroke engine, as the oil mixed with the petrol aged. was liable to have bearings become pitted when left standing. At first they bear up but, as the work of the engine wears them, they begin to break up. I knew this because it had happened to me driving once from Southend to London (a disastrous adventure which is a story in itself) and it would actually prove to be the case. It was some consolation that I was just arriving at services. I rode the bike around the garage forecourt there and it was obvious that there was no going on.

A kind lady at the Little Chef restaurant allowed me to store the bike in a small bin area in their car park, a sort of open air wooden shed. My father bailed me out, as usual, and he hired a trailer with which we picked it up. Weeks had passed and they were beginning to think about getting rid of it they said.

I loved it so much. People remarked on it wherever I went, tourists took photographs standing beside it and people from the former East Germany would shout 'MZ, MZ!' as I passed. It is, by far, my favourite thing that I have ever owned. It is standing at my parents' house. So if anybody wants to buy a motorbike.. It would be sad to see it go but perhaps one day I will be able to ride it again and I will buy it back off you. It has a nice registration plate number, huh?

Living City Plan

The first experience that I had of playing in a band was when Patrick, who was working as an engineer at The Strongroom Studio on Curtain Road, offered me an afternoon recording there in his free time before the pop group Spiritualised came in for the night. They had taken weeks, and would take weeks more, finishing an LP there. Lisa and I had worked out a few songs which we rehearsed a couple of times with Nick, Howard and Dino and then persuaded Joe to come along and play drums with us.

Recording was new to everyone except Joe who had seen it all before and who sat on his drum stool in between takes reading the paper. The results from The Strongroom weren’t that great. We didn't really know what we were doing after all.

Not long after came our first gig. It was downstairs at the Hope and Anchor in Highbury. The guitarist from Blur came but was turned away at the door since it was sold out. Is that note worthy? Probably not and it didn't seem so at the time either.

I made the mistake of taking some cocaine that Howard passed around. Aside from the fact that I don't like cocaine and I don't like people on cocaine and I don't like myself on cocaine and generally hate drugs, it proved to be a bad idea because it amplified my nervousness to the extent that I literally could not speak. My brother Adrian tried to make conversation and I had to run away, Lisa introduced her father, who was on holiday in London, but I couldn't reply to him.

After playing half a dozen shows I had no pre-performance nerves whatsoever, providing that I stayed away from Howard whose stage anxiety was so overwhelming it was contagious. It took me a while to realise this but, before I did, we'd always go to a pub together after the sound check. I'd enter feeling clear headed and leave, destined for the stage, a nervous wreck.

So, by the time we went to the newly opened Milo's studio on Hoxton Square (Howard knew someone who worked there perhaps) we had a name, Miss Mend, had rehearsed and had played a few shows. We hadn’t realised that we ought to have booked an engineer, it was a Saturday and for a while it looked as though we wouldn’t be able to get hold of anyone at the last minute. When we finally did get going it went smoothly. Listening to the record it seems like the studio must have had a great set up. At the time I really wasn't interested in the process of recording and just wanted to finish up and get to the pub but I’d love to know now what desk they used, what equalisers and compressors, which reverb unit.

Mixing the record was a pain. First of all we tried some people who had a studio set up below Proud Gallery (when it was located just off Villiers Street.) It was hot, cramped, humid and dusty in the cellar there, the environment was unbearable and the results were dreadful. In the end Clive Painter, who had recorded with the band Tram with whom we played many shows (we were label mates) mixed it at his home studio (where we would subsequently record our second single.)

Lisa sings the excellent A side, Living City Plan, and I one of the two songs on the B side. It really pains me that I sing with a slight inflection to some of the words like I’m pretending to be Stephen Pastel. Which, I am so sorry to say and it pains me on so many different levels to admit it, I probably was.

We were awarded 'Single Of The Week' by the New Musical Express but assumed this to be a fairly normal event for a new band, or I did at any rate, and so when the label Independiente summoned us for an interview at their Baron's Court office none of us put in any effort to impress them at all.

Myself and Lisa visited my parents house shortly after it was released and my parents' friend Cliff was also at the house as a guest for dinner. He'd played drums in jazz bands throughout his life. He asked to hear the record, I had given a copy to my mum and dad and so I put it on the turntable. It upset him, he didn't think that it qualified as a real song he said, he said that it was not music. He got quite agitated so I changed the subject.