And So I Watch You From Afar

 Famous Acquaintances

At the outset of this blog, I should issue an apology for the amount of name dropping that will take place. Ah sod it, these tales are the my claims to “fame” and I’m going for it!

After the departure of Young Simon, myself and Al Brown continued as a two-piece. This was back in the days before you had The White Stripes, or Royal Blood and the plethora of minimalist acts that followed. Sure, there’s always been two-piece acts but we stuck out as an entity in Belfast as nobody else was doing it. We changed our name from Funksmith to Foam. This band name was Al’s idea and I don’t know how he came up with it, I just recall I liked it. It suited us. It was snappy. It just seemed to summarise so much about us. With the disposable income I was generating plundering night shift in a local factory I bought an Akai Sampler and we shared financial outlay on a new Fostex 8-track Multitracker. Or “Fosty” as it was known. Fosty has resided in my attic for 10 years and I recently plugged it in to find a “DISK ERROR” message. I almost shed a tear at Fosty’s death, it also had an unreleased album in it, I always meant to finish the vocals off but never got round to it.

Our intention was simple. Record as much music as we could and release two albums a year. Just like The Beatles. All of the music we recorded was self-recorded, self-produced and I was the mug who sat for hours burning off CDRs and cutting out CD inlays. I had no life outside of work, I lived for music throwing all of my energy into cooking up sampled backtracks, mixing, recording and going to gigs as much as I could.

I was still also firing off our music to all and sundry, but by now there were people starting to generate a bit of a “scene” in Belfast. Two local journalist chaps, Paul McNamee and Colin Murray had started a new magazine, called Blank. They had a Demo review section. Now, we considered our music to be more than just demos, these were fully formed albums! But you take a break where you can get it. Our first album was entitled “Say You Will”. It had Huggy Bear on the cover and the 18 or so tracks on it featured samples from all of the bands we were into. Al was into Sly and The Family Stone and old funk records and I brought in extensive indie and metal influences as well as a love of Public Enemy and hip-hop. I was a whiz on the Akai and cadged together backing tracks, Al played guitar and keyboards and I played bass and sang. Our live show employed the third member, a portable mini disc player. Easy.

Our music struck a chord with Paul who wrote kind words about us and offered amazing support. I'm thinking maybe Colin too, as we got asked to play a gig in the Duke of York under the promotional banner of Colin’s Stereotype club and music forum Fastfude. The year was 1999 and the other acts on the bill were Desert Hearts, Kismet and a little old band called Snow Patrol, who were doing an acoustic set. I knew of Desert Hearts, they had a demo tape out and were causing quite a flurry of excitement locally. Kismet featured some chaps from my hometown Portadown but I didn’t know any of them. I had a copy of “Songs For Polar Bears”, Snow Patrol’s debut album for Jeepster, so was clued in on their songs and super excited to be in their company. We played our set which seemed to go pretty faultless (or I would have remembered it, more on the disasters we played in future blogs) and sat down to watch Snow Patrol. I remember shouting out for them to play “One Hundred Things You Should Have Done In Bed But Never Got The Chance To Try ” and Gary curtly refusing to do so with a snappy "No". I should maybe have picked a snappier song to shout out as I took up so much time asking but "Run" wasn't written then. As a side story, I once put on a gig in a Student Centre I stayed in for "Run" co-writer Iain Archer, back when he was a gospel type singer. I remember us taking home Gary's lovely red guitar lead by “mistake”. I don’t remember much else but that hasn’t stopped me bringing the gig up to anyone who even mentions their name! There’s a lovely plaque outside the Duke of York recalling the gig. But the piece of paper that was sent to the plaque makers got rained on and as a result, our name didn’t make it onto the plaque. This bit isn't strictly true, ahem...

Colin put on one other show for us before he took the leap to bigger and better things. This time we were the support band for a quadrophonic playback of The Flaming Lips’s “Zaireeka” album. He set up four PA speakers in each corner of Morrison’s upstairs bar and brought in four separate CD players. You had to play each disc simultaneously to hear the album. I had the idea to mix down each of our backing tracks onto a separate CD so that we too could play in quadrophonic sound. It was a brilliant experience and Colin was his usual charismatic self before the show, chatting to us to put us at ease. It’s not hard to see how he’s done so well. Could turn his hand to anything! Paul McNamee is now Editor of The Big Issue and I see he and Colin are once again linking up for some radio work. I will never forget the support from these two lads and for the record, it's brilliant how Snow Patrol went on to become global stars and Gary Lightbody is a lovely fella by all accounts helping out others in the music scene with his foundations. Respect. Anyway, that wraps up this set of tales. Thanks for reading once again!