Reunion? Well we should, shouldn't we?

With Tim & Paddy Bullen at James' Wedding

Life goes in cycles.  When you are in your twenties you get invited to lots of weddings as your friends begin to pair off.  Then you attend the christenings as they begin their families.  As those families grow and people move you lose touch until one day, you find yourself being asked for your fondest memories of them for their Eulogy.

Fortunately, we're not at the funeral stage yet, and hope not to be for a while.  Instead, sometimes a friend may marry again after a divorce as I have.  Some of my friends have done so more than once (you know who you are!), and so you get to do the wedding thing all over again.

We had our wedding disrupted by the Pandemic, so we could only have close family at the registry office ceremony.  Even my brother and family had to stand on the street with their noses against the windows, such was the restriction on numbers.

This last weekend we were invited to a 'second wedding,' and at last we had the opportunity to catch up with old friends that I'd not seen for at least 25 years.

Now this particular friend, James, was the Bass Player in the band I was part of at university.  James was a star in those days.  He was a friend of a couple of the other band members, all from Shaw near Oldham.  Whilst the other pair were students with me in Liverpool, James worked in Oldham.  He would drive over to Liverpool every weekend and spend it with us, rehearsing and gigging.  It was a serious level of commitment that was not appreciated enough at the time, even though we spent an appropriate amount of time and money in the pub.  Now James has three teenage lads, a new baby and now at last a lovely wife.

Also in attendance was Tim, who thirty years ago convinced me to spend my student grant on a Bass Guitar and amplifier to start the band with him.  Every time Tim and I get together the conversation eventually comes round to one topic: The Band.

With Tim at James' Wedding

We talk about the songs, the gigs and how we miss playing together.  We always come to some agreement that we should do something and then in the cold light of the morning we do precisely nothing about it.  Indeed, we have the same conversations between all of us.  Greg the singer, Martyn the drummer and of course James as well.  With the encouragement of a few pints, we can be on the verge of a full-blown reunion tour, but alas the enthusiasm fades as our realisation that the time required and the distance between us make the long slog of the rehearsal needed, an impossible task.

However, this time it might be different.

The band which we ended up calling Cotton, was formed in the autumn of 1992.  This was my first term at Liverpool University, with Tim on Guitar, me on Bass and a Drummer named Steve Kenny.  We rehearsed in the gym at the Greenbank Halls where we lived, at the foot of Penny Lane.  

After a few months we added a singer Greg Jefford, started rehearsing at the more professional Crash Studios in Liverpool City Centre and we even played a gig at the Aigburth Orange Lodge.  After a few months Jefford decided, (or Tim and I did), that he wasn't rock and roll material and so we replaced him with Greg Hambley, a friend of Tim's from Shaw.  Greg took this so seriously he transferred from Salford University to Liverpool so he could be a rock and roll legend 24/7.

Whilst Greg can play guitar, he wanted to concentrate on singing and so James joined us on Bass, and I moved to playing Rhythm Guitar.  The line-up was complete, we were ready for Britpop.

Over the next couple of years, we played in venues around Merseyside and Greater Manchester.  We went to the now long-gone Hard City Records recording studio in Liverpool and recorded a number of original songs.  We could count Janis Long and Clint Boon as fans, and even Terry Christian said we were 'shit', which is about the best endorsement you can get.

Playing Derby & Rathbone Hall JCR

Then Steve Kenny said he'd had enough and left.  Enter the "Octopus in a Blender" that is Martyn Keenan.  Martyn is a great drummer, and his skill pushed the rest of us to a higher level.  Things were going well musically but as happens in all relationship's cracks began to appear.

We were changing personally.  Tim, Greg, James and I had met the girls we would later marry, though for both me and James we would later divorce (not each other obviously!)  Tim had left Liverpool and was working in Manchester.  In the end we just fell apart and that was that.

However, in 1996 just before we broke up, we went into the recording studio and recorded four songs.  These have sat on an old 32-track master tape since then, unheard and collecting dust on Tim's shelf.  After watching the recent Beatles Get Back documentary, he suggested we do something with the old tape.  A little research found a company that could digitise the tape so we could recover the songs.  Initially we thought there were all 12 songs we had recorded on the tape.  We were very disappointed to find there were only the four, but once we heard them, we were blown away.  We all very quickly came to the conclusion, these songs were good, very good.  We should have stuck at it.

What could we do with the other songs?  Tim suggested we try collaborating at distance, recording our parts and emailing them to him to bring together.  James bought his first Bass guitar in 25 years, and Greg bought a microphone.  We started to work on the earlier songs which we don't have the master tapes for, those having been destroyed years ago.  It's a work in progress, but for the first time this century we're making music together.

But there's more as Jimmy Cricket used to say.  My son Tom, the Noel Gallagher impersonator, discovered the 12 songs, and some others that we had written but not recorded properly.  He was quite taken, describing our 'album' as better than Definitely Maybe, which I think is stretching it slightly.  Anyway, he and I performed two Cotton songs at our recent Dad & The Lad gig to a great reception, as I posted about earlier.

Dad & The Lad Play at The Coach House Inn, Bentham

Back at the wedding and quite well lubricated Tim took this news well.  So well in fact that the following morning whilst nursing his hangover through Manchester Airport he messaged our WhatsApp group.

"We're getting the band back together."

Maybe this time.  Maybe.

Judge for yourself by visiting our old and creaky Facebook page here

There are even some videos on YouTube although sadly James is missing here and here

Also, some of the original songs can be found here

The Birth of Dad & The Lad

 

It was a quiet holiday.  The odd day trip, the odd meal out.  A celebration of our Wedding Anniversary and an 18th Birthday.  Plenty of rest in the summer sunshine, reading Bill Bryson and enjoying a very relaxing time.  Then eldest son gets a message.

"It's the Beer Festival next Saturday can your dad's band play either 3-5 or 5-7, let me know they need to get the programmes printed."

Aside from the short notice, the super cool bass player is away at a music festival in Oxfordshire so we're not available, and yet...

Perhaps it was the Pinot Grigio that was interfering with my thought processes, because I heard myself say:

"Tell him your brother and I will do 3-5, something acoustic, probably Oasis and Beatles songs."

"Great you're on!" was the reply.

I slept on it and realised in the morning we weren't in that episode of Dallas where it was all a dream.  We had a week to sort out a couple of hours of songs that my youngest and I could perform with me singing and playing acoustic rhythm and him playing lead guitar.

Now as I've posted before our Thomas isn't a huge fan of the three-chord rock and roll standard.  He is very into Oasis and plays Noel Gallagher's guitar parts as well as anyone.  Now that's great except I resemble Liam Gallagher in no discernible way except age (actually I'm just over a year younger), and there's no way I'm wearing a Parker, especially not in mid-August.  

Whilst I like Oasis and have a fondness for Wonderwall, having to learn 25 songs in such a short period of time was going to be nigh on impossible.  I convinced him we should include some Beatles songs as well, especially since the audience weren't going to sit through more than a dozen Oasis songs without getting twitchy.

Reluctantly he agreed and so we set off to the beach with the dog to write a set list.

In the time it takes a Border Collie to resemble a drowned rat we had a long list of 30 songs to work with.  Some we both knew well: Don't Look Back in Anger, Supersonic and Some Might Say.  Others would be a stretch for him: A Hard Day's Night, She Loves You, Eleanor Rigby, and some would be a voyage into the unknown:  The Masterplan and Stand by Me (better known as the Halifax advert).

We began to rehearse in earnest.  Some songs we ditched like Helter Skelter because they just wouldn't work, and some like Songbird we persevered with.  However, we found ourselves a couple of songs short of the 25 we needed.  Tom suggested something a bit radical.

When Oasis and Blur were battling for number ones at the height of Britpop in the mid 1990's.  I was part of a band at university.  We were on reflection pretty good, and we had ambition, but as our time studying came to an end the band fizzled out.  During our time we had written and recorded some original songs.  Tom discovered these and taught himself to play them.  He suggested we should perform a couple now.  No one in the audience would know how they were actually supposed to sound so it wouldn't matter if we made mistakes.  Brilliant!  We chose two:  False Paradise and Smalltown.

Saturday dawned as a hot summer's day.  We set up outside the pub to a packed beer garden and began:

"I need to be myself, I can be no one else..."

We were away.  Tom was brilliant, he's a very talented guitarist and was absolutely faultless, even when I cut him off in the middle of the Live Forever solo.  We played for two hours, and I got sunburned.  There really was rapturous applause, if you doubt me watch the videos on our Facebook page @DadLadMusic.

One song in particular got a very positive reaction.  Not Oasis, not The Beatles, not even the 12-bar rock and roller about driving on the A65 I've previously posted about.  No, we got a standing ovation for Smalltown, a song that hasn't been played live anywhere for at least 25 years.  Time for a reunion for the uni band?  Could be.

In the meantime, Dad and the Lad are born, now go and follow us on Facebook!