The Highs...

When Foam started out, the internet wasn’t really a thing. Not like the overpowering and all encompassing beast it is today anyway. The only access I had to the internet was in the wee café in Shaftsbury Square and I had to travel up to Belfast from Portadown to go to it. The draw was a local forum called Fastfude. This is where I would make our rare gig announcements and each time we put out a new CD, there would be a new post to herald the arrival. When I got myself a Dreamcast console I could access this at home, albeit by dangling cables over the bannisters to plug the damn thing into the wall socket!

There was no such thing as Spotify, or iTunes, or Bandcamp. MySpace hadn’t been invented yet either. One of the first websites dedicated to finding new music and exposing it, was called Peoplesound.com. During one of the BelFest festivals, there was word of one of the head honchos from Peoplesound coming to meet bands. So we found ourselves sat in front of an excitable English man called Zac Leeks. This was our first encounter with someone from that side of the fence and I was in my element. Zac was full of big ideas and liked our music. He was true to his word when he added Foam to a magazine cover mount CD of new acts, under the Peoplesound banner. It amounted to nothing though, despite my expectations. Fast forward 20 years or so. I now write music reviews for a website called Echoes And Dust. Imagine my utter surprise when I got a promo from a certain Zac Leeks for one of his new bands. It’s an odd name, there couldn’t be more than one so I replied to him reminding of that time he let one of the world’s best least known acts slip through his hands. Arf.

I also got wind that a certain Creation Records had acquired our music and there was interest. So I got the number of this chap who worked for them from Paul McNamee and dutifully rang him up. Yes indeed, he had heard our music and really liked it. The bubble was burst though (pun intended) when it transpired this guy was only a plugger, not an A&R man. But for me, this was still a way in to one of the country’s most successful labels. Sadly, the successful label was ran by the maverick Alan McGee and a few dodgy decisions warranted the imminent demise of Creation, literally within months of my phone call. Bollocks.

I remember too some correspondence with the American producer Kim Fowley. I hadn't heard of him but randomly he'd heard of us. That didn't amount to anything either, but it shows how lucky breaks can and do happen.

These were fanciful notions in reality, but we were making great inroads back home. Across The Line would play us regularly, Johnny Hero was now a fan playing us regularly too. BBC Radio 1 had decided to show interest in regions and had a show on Thursday nights hosted by Colin Murray and Donna Legge. We got invited down to do an interview, they even supplied us with some beer prior to going on air. Not the wisest move to be honest, I have a recording of that interview somewhere, but I can’t bring myself to replay it! We also recorded a session for the Beeb, getting paid for the effort too. We had a song “Palms Springs, Colorado” which was a spoken word track and I re-jigged the wording to be a follow-up version updating the correspondent on my newly acquired whereabouts. See? Bursting with ideas and invention.

We had articles in Hot Press, the lovely Colin Carberry saying we were a “…consistently brave and inquisitive band, who every now and then come up with some absolute pearls”. We got to support the utterly fabulous but slightly unhinged US Indie underground rocker Bobby Conn in  Auntie Annie’s, courtesy of the good folks at Ski Bunny. We were regularly on bills with other local prospects such as Desert Hearts and Tracer AMC. We got to play the Limelight many times. A real highlight for me given the number of bands I had watched in there. One of those gigs was also recorded and broadcast on Radio 1. Hopefully long gone from their archives, as it was pretty shite!

We always had the tag of being the most prolific band in Northern Ireland due to the fact we managed to fire out two albums a year amassing well over 100 songs. We just couldn’t stop making music. As Colin said, there were some absolute pearls in there. I still love listening to those songs, some I can recall the creation of, others I have no idea how they came to be. I can’t release most of them now because they feature samples of other people’s music. So those were the highs (I remember) from the Foam era of my musical career. Next blog will look at the lows and the ultimate demise of the dynamic duo.


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