I don’t know whether you saw recently but there was a post on Facebook by the singer of Slaughter and the Dogs (https://www.satd.band/) berating his band members for being greedy and unthinking, saying that he was sacking the lot of them and threatening legal action if they used the name.
Now Wayne clearly feels hurt and wronged (I can’t say if that’s reasonable, I wasn’t there) but do you feel that Slaughter and the Dogs fans want to know about this?
It reminded me of the documentary “Don’t You Wish We Were Dead” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned:_Don%27t_You_Wish_That_We_Were_Dead) about the Damned. It shows what a fine band they are but, oh, the bickering looks sad and silly.
You see, bands tend to be made up of selfish, egotistical people who live in each others pockets for way too long. Those people are called musicians and to be one you have to have a bit of an ego. Normal, sensible people wouldn’t put themselves through the stress of getting up on stage, especially in the early days when you aren’t any good and the whole exercise is a bit degrading. It takes a bit of thick skinned determination to carry on after a bunch of overweight men in Middlesbrough have just told you “you’re shit”, as happened to me in The Boys after our second gig (mind you, we were shit at that early time, so they were only telling the truth).
In my experience fights within bands are commonplace and always about something stupid. It’s summed up by the best definition I have ever heard of a band manager: “Someone who looks after a bunch of children until they sack him/her”.
And so, with no desire to join the ranks of the immature (but I’m going to anyway), I have never spoken about the circumstances of my leaving The Boys (http://www.theboys.co.uk/). It was a result of the usual mixture of petty stupidity, with blame on all sides and who needs to know about that? I remember sitting with Charlie Harper just afterwards who asked why I’d left. As I was mid explanation, I could see the look of incredulity on his face and felt pretty daft. It really was all nonsense.
It might have been embarrassing foolishness but that didn’t stop it being almightily painful at the same time, and the proof, I believe, can be heard in the song “All Fall Down” from Little Big Head.
Tensions had been building up for a while but in typical Boys fashion we laughed them off. We called a tour of South America the “We All Love Each Other” tour which cracked us up in between the bickering, and helped paper over the cracks. But not for long. During the next tour, in Spain, things boiled over and went past the point of no return.
And so “We all came running home again, to go our separate ways. All left losers in the game, with those who loved and gave us praise”, I.e. you the fans lost out, as well as us in the band.
And “Nothing really lasts forever” although I had previously thought it would. The sense of loss in the song was heightened in the recording by my losing my voice, a result of overwork from singing all lead and backing vocals in too short a time. The fragility of the vocals brings out the hurt, I believe.
But I did get a damn fine song out of it and another on the 2nd album “Not the Kind of Guy Girls Hug” which is also in part about the same subject.
So the pain/hurt/loss lasted a few years, but at about the time of the release of “Bombs Away” I suddenly woke up and thought: “Wow. Look at this! Look at the reaction at these gigs, look at what people are saying about the records, look at the promoters who are ringing me up!”
And for the new (fourth) record (due out later this year or early next for those of you quite reasonably asking where the record is you have already paid for!), we have a song in contention called “Can We Stop Having Fun”. This has the line “I don’t know where I’d be today, without some fisticuffs along the way”.
And that sums it up really. A painful episode leading to a song which is just one of the building blocks behind the most fulfilling part of my career.
Sometimes the worst things just turn out to be for the best.
“All Fall Down” can be heard on the “Little Big Head 2019 Reissue” which is being distributed by those fine people at Cherry Red Records (https://www.cherryred.co.uk/). You can buy it through their Website here: Link to Cherry Red and also on Amazon and all good record stores.
For those of you with Spotify you can hear “All Fall Down ” from the original release here:
And if you don’t have Spotify the song can be heard on our Bandcamp site here: https://duncanreidandthebigheads.bandcamp.com/track/all-fall-down
Quite unexpectedly “All Fall Down” became a cracker of a live song as I believe is evidenced from a performnce at The Lexington (http://www.thelexington.co.uk/) some years ago.