Tear Gas At The Laurel Tree

The Laurel Tree in Camden is where all the indie kids would hang out in the 90s. Jane and I discovered the place by accident when we decided to run away from our flatmate one evening. He was queuing in the chip shop beside Camden Tube and, although it was a mean thing to do, I am glad that we did it. Parsley's band 'Dutronc' were playing cover versions of Jacques and I thought that the whole place was just fantastic. I returned the next week and met Morgane, the first of all of the people that would become my friends in London. I proudly let it slip that I was playing bass for the Television Personalities but she beat me by letting me know that she played keyboards for Stereolab, who I thought were just fantastic. Morgane introduced me to Nick and Dino who became great friends with whom I'd go to lots of parties with and with whom I'd start the band Miss Mend (and later play in The Projects with Morgane and later still Dino.)

One time I was at Chris and Loretta's 'co-op' club night and I found myself wanting for cigarettes. I drunkenly pushed my way through the crowd to the stairs. The ground floor hosted a depressing pop disco and the dance floor was heaving with fake tans. I pushed my way to the cigarette machine and allowed it to prop me up as I slowly filled it with all the coins that I had, searching every pocket for extra five and ten pence pieces.

Eventually the packet of cigarettes was in my hand and I turned on my heel to find the whole place absolutely empty. The few hundred people had disappeared. It was quite a dream like experience. The room that had been a heaving, sweating, drunken mess was, to my surprise, deserted. Then I began to taste what I assume to have been tear gas at the back of my throat. I returned upstairs. It seemed that It couldn't have been a large tear gas canister that had been thrown down there because it didn't have much of an effect on me.

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.