The Immediate #000 - Preface - The Mold (Un)Scene '89-'91

Daisychain and beyond. Musings on musical failure. But not Muse.

We had been playing together since the fag-end of 1989. Duncan booked a rehearsal room above the local record and CD emporium where he worked - Back Alley Music - and invited a disparate group of acquaintances along. He asked his friend Simon (who played keyboards and tucked in jumpers). Simon lived in the same village as me and must have mentioned this opportunity in passing. I didn’t really know Duncan. We’d been bullied for being in chess club when we were first years, but that was the limit of our shared experience.

I told my mate Richard Harrison who had flunked his A-Levels and been sent back a year to get better grades. Richard was in a proper punk band - Blasphemy Squad - who were inspired by Conflict, Dagnasty and The Clash. Richard needed some persuading but valued the distraction, I think. His dad was terminally ill. Music is the greatest escape.

Richard tried to escape - in very amusing fashion - when we used to busk in Chester. We’d butcher The Proclaimers’ ‘500 Miles’ and Richard would walk down the rows away from me while we were playing it. We thought it was hilarious. We barely made the fare for the bus-ride home.

My best friend Daniel heard about the get together on the grapevine. I’m not sure I would have told him. I loved Daniel, but he couldn’t play anything. At all. And all the girls fancied him and his roguish (i.e. not all that hygienic) ways.

It didn’t take us long to realise Daniel’s complete lack of musicality and his unfathomable, grimy sexual allure made him perfect front-man material.

Anyone can sing, right?

Wrong, it transpired.

Daniel had a headful of ideas and soul, and an unbridled imagination when it wasn’t bent on shagging. He also had a deep and genuine love for music of all hues. In that - especially - we were soul brothers: King Crimson, Bob Dylan, Wham!, Blodwyn Pig, The Cardiacs, Bob Marley, Gene Pitney, The Byrds, Billy Bragg and his beloved Smiths.

There was more, of course. As soon as I started to list what I thought was an astonishingly eclectic broad sweep of music, I realised how mundane and two dimensional it might read to a Generation Zedder with all music ever twitching at their fingertips.

We had horizons limited by what we could afford to buy (very limited… all skint); shoplift (risky, but the store detectives in Mold Woollys were very slow and Daniel worked there), or what was shared with us via compilation tapes.

Narrow horizons bred deep loves, and Richard Holland - a few years older and with a house he was happy for us to get stoned in - made the best compilation tapes. Far from killing music, his fine taste embellished ours and developed life long obsessions with The Beach Boys, XTC, The Monochrome Set, The Undertones, The Creatures, Julie Driscoll, The Stranglers, British psych and jazz, and so much more.

We gorged on these strange old sounds and slowly - but surely - fell completely out of kilter with our peers.

Liverpool and Manchester were only an hour-ish away on the train… somewhat longer and riskier if we hitched (which Dan and I did, regularly). The great bands of that era - from both cities - The Stone Roses, The La’s, Happy Mondays, The Stairs and The Real People - all had a profound effect on us. But there was something awry in the way we assimilated those influences.

We heard them distorted through the lens of Holland’s compilation tapes. The Stone Roses were great, but we knew Love were obviously better. We’d dance along to Happy Mondays’ ‘Step On’ but we preferred John Kongos’ original. See also The Farm’s reading of Stepping Stone.

Our earliest demos - recorded at Studio ‘X’ in Holywell, by Marty - were an artlessly plagiaristic take on the baggy sound. I was a stale thrift shop Squire, wah-wahing as if my life depended on it. Dan had something of Tim Booth about him. Richard thought he was Bruce Foxton and I think Simon was still happiest listening to his Howard Jones cassettes.

The Mold scene centred around The Tiv in Buckley and - more importantly for us - Sureways… a gym with a bar and a perverse interest in putting on the local bands: us (Daisychain… I was oblivious to its connotations until much later); WantOnThought; All Too Human; Girohead; She Said; Cousin Grace; Baby Milk Plant. We were all noisy and mostly quite shit. The proprietor let us play because it pulled a crowd on to the Bromfield industrial estate that otherwise wouldn’t have been there.

It’s where I did my first DJ gigs, too.

We drank and had all of the rites of passage you’d expect within - and just outside - its breezeblock walls and sticky carpets. Lord knows what the gym-goers made of the smell of pachouli, cider, sick and of the discarded fag butts and condoms when they arrived to work out the next morning.

This not-quite-burgeoning local scene festered around Sureways and The Kings Arms in Wrexham. The night everyone remembers at Sureways was the night Goodnight Said Florence played. They’d been signed by Different Class Records and we all hated them for it, and for their subsequent sell-out appearance on Tomorrow’s World (helping to market a laser disc, the pricks!). It didn’t help that they all looked like trust fund kids on hippy gap years in Kashmir. Mike - their drummer - was lovely and brilliant, but there was a sense of entitlement about them - and a general loping fey arseholery to their music - which didn’t endear them to the Mold punks.

Conrad - who could patronise the spots off a ladybird with a PhD - told a thoroughly unimpressed audience: “if you can do better, come on, then!”

I don’t know how statements like that rolled at the Art College in Wrexham but Mold wasn’t going to refuse the invitation. Big Nick went to grab something - or someone - there was scuffling. A fire exit was thrown open and their ‘legendary’ van (cute submarine logo painted on the side like what Steve Albini wouldn’t have done) was loaded at a double quick rate, while the crowd turned into a mob and ran them, and their van, out of town under a fusillade of stones, bottles and threats.

Of course, this was cooler than anything any of us had yet achieved. They’d catalysed an authentic situationist punk rock moment, more situationist and punk rock than any of the people running over the gravel to take aim at their wanker van with an empty Newcy Brown bottle.

But the smugness. The overwhelming smugness meant that this was their footnote.

Our footnote - as Daisychain - was a gig protesting against the first Gulf War at the International 2 in Manchester. This was the biggest deal for us. Manchester was still, just about, the epicentre of everything, musically-speaking, in the UK at that moment. I thought we’d be rubbing shoulders with Ian and Reni, Bez and Shaun. As things transpired, the Gulf War had the audacity to end - very inconveniently - a fortnight before the gig. Which still went ahead.

It was a fun night out but there couldn’t have been a more appropriately symbolic and salutary underlining of our timing and zeitgeist-missing.

A good thing, beyond the friendship and good memories, did come out of the Mold un(Scene) for me. One night we were not-rehearsing or improving ourselves at Y Delyn in Mold when someone pointed to a man at the bar and said, “he works at the local radio station.”

I was a bit pissed, and very full of myself, and I belligerently told this friendly-looking man that Radio Clwyd was a load of shit because it wasn’t supporting the local music scene.

Two weeks later they called me up and asked me to do a show for them. And I’ve been there every since. I’ll let you decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing from your perspective. For me, it was life-changing.

Daisychain - Dan and I - had bravado but we didn’t have quality control or a work ethic. I don’t think we understood what was required to be any fucking good. As long as we were better than our peers in Mold - and that’s a pointless argument if ever there was one - that was enough.

All but the most fortunate tiny handful have to put their ten thousand hours in. We’d probably invested as much time as our mates’ bands… a couple of thousand hours… but we spent many thousands more hours talking about how great and misunderstood / overlooked we were. We convened in the caff in Mold (Meet ’n’ Eat) at 10am every day to discuss our amazingness over so many fags they’d have to open up the fire exit to let the smoke out.

If it was a Thursday we’d then collect our dole cheques from the Post Office, cash them and reconvene to go over the fine points of how fucking amazing we were until closing time at The Ruthin Castle, Y Delyn or The Dolphin.

Then we’d tramp back to Rich’s house on Ffordd Pentre and spend another couple of hours hatching plans we’d never execute while playing the world’s longest game of Monopoly, or taking turns on Super Mario Bros.

We did all of this prevarication instead of rehearsing or writing. Or arranging gigs. Yet we were still - as far as we were all concerned - professional musicians.

My only band-related regret - other than that last night in St Tropez - was that we could have been contenders had we put the hours in. As it was we were pretenders - little ‘p’ -, but the gap might have been surmountable. And that - in hindsight - gnaws away at me.

The moral of these pieces about my band - still theoretically operational - is that if you want to be great, work hard. And then work harder again. And make the music your focus. No amount of digital chicanery or social media smoke and mirrors is going to make up for moribund music, because that it what most of us excel at. There’s no shame in that. In fact, there’s a lot of joy. There can be fewer more rewarding past times, but if you want to make it your life, then make it your life with no excuses.

A plaid wave was about to break on the country and change everything, and we were completely out of synch with it.

I know now that Dan and Kurt would have shared a lot of inspirations: The Vaselines and The Pooh Sticks amongst them. Still not sure that Dan knows one of my best friends of the last 30 years is Hue Pooh. Maybe now, though, eh?

The first time I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit, in a student hovel in Mold, that is now the Glasfryn gastropub, I thought it was OK. But it was nowhere near as good as Cud or Blur’s ‘Popscene’ (in its own way, epoch-defining).

The musical stew that we were cooking up in between trips to Meet ’n’ Eat was politico punk, proto Britpop with proggy aspirations. It was a horrible mess, so out of time - and before its time - I’m rather proud of it now.

Fast forward 18 months: we’ve been further disconnected from trends by our long sojourns in Blaenau Ffestiniog (which will merit their own chapter). We have become so uncool I think we’re verging on visionary. Certainly much of it was Liberty Cap induced.

We play a gig at The Tivoli in Buckley. For a couple of years we were one of their ‘go to’ local bands, guaranteed to pull a crowd and prop up a touring headliner.

We’d been ensconced in Blaenau finally doing what we needed to do, playing playing playing every day, enabled by dole cheques we could barely spend. The local pubs wouldn’t serve Sais-sounding gobshites from Mold and the local caffs weren’t keen on our one panad per 2 hours spending regime. We had nothing else to do other than to make music.

Those days are some of my happiest memories.

We fell into a wormhole of My Bloody Valentine, ‘Revolver’, Ride, Kevin Ayers and The Boo Radleys’ ‘Giant Steps’, and god knows what else.

When we emerged we were a bit weird. Not Gong-weird. We sounded like all the Creation bands playing simultaneously. Our proudest moment - ‘Child In You’ - was seven minutes of acid jazz riffs, break beats, monolithic noisy breakdowns, a la-la-la coda to challenge Hey Jude in the will-it-ever-fade-out stages, all segueing into a sweet, unsubtle doffing of the cap to Teenage Fanclub’s ‘Bandwagonesque’ called ‘Had Too Much of a Good Time’.

I mean, if it ever had been that good every A&R man in the UK would have been circling.

But the industry knew nothing about us or Blaenau Ffestiniog. Our magnum opus remained un-mixed and un-mastered. It was never released, not even on a demo tape. In all the time we were together we sent out a sub-total of zero tapes to record labels and A&R people.

We were just content to roll along in blind hope.

These pieces about ‘my’ band (I wrote the songs… that was my mantra when avoiding any logistical responsibilities, like driving to and from gigs) will - hopefully - underline that success and recognition while desirable, don’t diminish making music’s ability to engender the best memories and experiences.

If you’re going to aim high, aim high and good luck. If you’re happy to roll around in the muck, the broken dream glass and half-arsed song ciggy butts, you may end up all the richer for the experiences.

I mean, you could have ended up in Muse. Count your blessings, and then count them again.

Over the coming months I’m going to write more about Daisychain, Metroland and The Immediate. I’ll intersperse those posts with more generally interesting stuff detailing my radio experiences with bona fide artistes.

If you want to hear what we became, there is a fine best of The Immediate on Spotify:

and available on suitably authentic cassette via bandcamp: