In late 2011, Oklahoma quintet Other Lives played a show at Leaf in Liverpool. My friend managed to get us on the guest list, so we hopped on a train at Manchester Piccadilly and made our way over there. It turned out to be a great night, we got drunk and made a nuisance of ourselves in the best possible way.
Other Lives were all lovely people and chatted with us over cigarettes outside the venue on Bold Street before their set. We met their manager, Phil Costello - a quirky-looking, well connected gent, lanky with big glasses. He told us stories about guys he knew like Paul Westerberg, to my euphoria - I'm a massive fan of The Replacements.
In 1997 Phil was the marketing guy at Capitol Records who'd had the bright idea of super-gluing promo cassettes of Radiohead's OK Computer into tape machines and sending them to press and radio people in advance of the albums release. The aim was to encourage them to listen to the album repeatedly - the label considered the record a grower and not the ideal commercial follow up to The Bends. Phil's innovative strategy was developed to give OK Computer a head start and in the end the album performed way better than the 500,000 units the label had initially projected it would shift - funny how things turn out.
I remember Other Lives played a great set in Liverpool that night, tearing through songs from their brilliant second album Tamer Animals - imagine Ennio Morricone with a twist of Radiohead and a hint of folk. We were stood among a throng of fans at the foot of the stage in Leaf's spacious and characterful upstairs room with its ornate high ceiling. After the show and the drunken shenanigans that followed, the band invited us to come and see them perform at Manchester's The Deaf Institute the following week.
It turned out to be one of the best shows I've seen. The band were even better than they were in Liverpool the week before and the sound in The Deaf Institute was glorious. That night front-man Jesse Tabish and cellist Jenny Hsu told us they'd just got the exciting news that they were going on tour with Radiohead in America - a few of the Radiohead guys had attended their show in Oxford a few days earlier. They explained how nervous they'd all been about it, knowing that members of Radiohead were in the audience and that it had completely blown their minds to meet Thom Yorke and discover he was a fan of their band. I wasn't surprised by this, as we said our goodbyes - if you've heard Tamer Animals or attended an Other Lives show you won't be either.
When I was thirteen my dad handed a demo tape I'd made on an old four-track recorder to Andy Macpherson, the owner of a local recording studio called Revolution - housed in an inconspicuous, ivy-covered building on a busy main road near a high school. This led to me spending a lot of time hanging out there on the weekends, lending a hand during sessions, observing the recording/mixing process, making cups of tea for bands and engineers, running out for groceries, walking dogs and occasionally being asked for my opinion on how something sounded. It was a pretty amazing experience for a school kid, head over heels in love with music.
Of the bands I met during this period I remember Teenage Fanclub, who were making their fourth studio album Thirteen (Creation Records, 1993) the most vividly. This was because they were Scottish and I'd lived in Glasgow for a while as a kid and because, like me, they loved football. I remember them excitedly playing football games on a computer while producer/engineer Andy Macpherson tweaked mixes in the adjacent control room. They were a chilled out bunch of guys who sloped around the studio and didn't mind having me around. There were piles of their CD's on hand for inspiration and reference. I remember browsing through the CD stacks, wondering what the obscure sounding bands they championed might sound like. They'd just finished touring with Nirvana at the time - a pretty big deal then and now. I don't remember them talking about it, Nirvana were one of my favourite bands so I'm sure I must have pestered them for stories - maybe I was too shy or maybe what happened on the road was too explicit for my young ears.
I'm still fond of Thirteen, not just because I like the songs or because I was there - the album reminds me of a moment in time when anything seemed possible. All you needed were good songs, a healthy dose of passion and some like-minded pals to form a band with, start a revolution and conquer the world.
My mum gave me a copy of Smells Like Teen Spirit on 7 inch vinyl in September 1991 - she heard it and thought I'd like it. I remember staring at the mysterious, blurry faces on the cover, I didn't know what to make of it and I couldn't imagine what the music would sound like - I didn't even know what the word nirvana meant. When the needle dropped and those now unmistakable opening chords came blaring out of the speakers I'd love to harp on about how it immediately changed my life but it didn't - it took a few listens before I became slowly hooked. I was barely twelve years old. My world was skateboarding, football, computer games, music and girls, in that order. I loved Prince, The Stone Roses, Michael Jackson, Guns N' Roses and Metallica. I'd already discovered the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Motown and more obscure sounding artists like Nick Drake through my parents vinyl collection. But Nirvana was something new to my ears - a simpler and more primal sound.
It wasn't metal. The electric guitars were more colourful in tone and less about flamboyant showmanship than your typical hair-metal band of the time - it sounded like anyone could pick up a guitar and play this stuff. The chord progressions weren't typical either, something that caught my young ear and enhanced the feeling that this band were channeling something exotic and new. After a few listens to the partially undefinable words, the quiet verse/loud chorus dynamics, the singers seemingly untrained voice and impassioned, raucous screams, I became addicted - I'm still a huge fan.
For a short while it felt like Nirvana were my secret. Then I began to notice other kids at school getting into them too. Then after a while it felt like every kid I knew liked Nirvana. Even the kids who didn't really like the band were pretending to like them just to fit in - such was the speed and scale of Nirvana's rise to fame. Three years later when my mum told me Kurt Cobain was dead I remember pretending not to care.
Other Lives were all lovely people and chatted with us over cigarettes outside the venue on Bold Street before their set. We met their manager, Phil Costello - a quirky-looking, well connected gent, lanky with big glasses. He told us stories about guys he knew like Paul Westerberg, to my euphoria - I'm a massive fan of The Replacements.
In 1997 Phil was the marketing guy at Capitol Records who'd had the bright idea of super-gluing promo cassettes of Radiohead's OK Computer into tape machines and sending them to press and radio people in advance of the albums release. The aim was to encourage them to listen to the album repeatedly - the label considered the record a grower and not the ideal commercial follow up to The Bends. Phil's innovative strategy was developed to give OK Computer a head start and in the end the album performed way better than the 500,000 units the label had initially projected it would shift - funny how things turn out.
