The (Non) Events Arena Festival, Rhyl

What a total farce. I should’ve known from the start, really. When the production manager, told me there’d be “10 to 15,000 people” there, I took him at his word. What I didn’t realise was that he actually meant ten. Not ten thousand — just ten. That’s about how it felt when we rolled up to the so-called “festival.”

The gig was supposed to be a charity event, raising money for Shelter. A good cause, which is why we’d agreed to do it. But the pair of tossers organising it insisted on handling the advertising themselves, instead of leaving it to someone who knew what they were doing. The result? The only poster I ever saw was a scrappy A4 sheet taped up in a Chinese chippy. It looked more like a college enrolment form than a festival flyer, and our name was buried at the bottom like an afterthought. That was their masterstroke in marketing.

When the Sons Of Selina turned up at 7pm — two hours before we were due on — the site was dead. No bands playing, maybe a hundred people milling about looking lost. Just as a few coachloads of people began arriving, the council showed up, locked themselves in the control room and pulled the plug. Their excuse? “The decibel levels are too high, residents are complaining.” This from the same bunch now under investigation for £7 million worth of fraud.

To make matters worse, the whole arena had been designed back-to-front in the first place. The stage faced the town instead of the sea, so any noise went straight into people’s living rooms. Years of local taxes wasted, and for what? An arena that now only gets used once a year, for the bloody Radio One Roadshow.

I actually tried to reason with Councillor David Davies. Asked him what he thought his actions meant for the bands, or for the people who’d travelled miles to see us and Primitive Faith. His reply was smug, priggish, almost gleeful. His colleagues sat there sneering, gloating in self-satisfaction. I felt violence bubbling under my skin, but I held back. Better to let it fester and save it for the music. Besides, I knew the fraud scandal would catch up with them eventually. Big boys in prison, with fallen men for company — I almost look forward to it.

We never played. Primitive Faith never played. Nobody did. What could’ve been a decent night for a good cause was smothered by a mix of incompetence, arrogance, and amateurism.

In my frustration I wrote to the papers. I called out the council for their hypocrisy and the organisers for their half-baked advertising. I even urged anyone left out of pocket to claim back their expenses — and, if by some miracle they ever saw a penny, to donate it to Shelter anyway, since that’s what the whole thing was meant to be about. I ended the letter with one final lesson: never use council property, and never trust anyone whose posters look like car boot sale adverts.

That’s what we were left with. No gig, no sound, no stage. Just another farce in Rhyl — the kind of small-town mess you couldn’t make up if you tried.

Sons Of Selina - The Bistro, Rhyl

 

It only took four years, three singles, one album, and a Radio One session before Sons of Selina finally played our first hometown gig. People always asked: why not sooner? The truth is I never wanted to get caught up in the local band mentality that swirls around Rhyl like bad weather. Every town has it — the rivalries, the gossip, the back-slapping with knives hidden behind backs — but when it’s your own patch it feels toxic. We kept our distance. We avoided the sycophantic local press. We didn’t want to be part of that small-town scene. The only local band I’d seen and genuinely enjoyed recently were The Fluff.

Still, sooner or later you’ve got to face your own doorstep.

A few days before the gig I’d floated the idea of projecting a video I’d put together with Dave the Rave (ex-PSST) over the stage while we played. On a Delerium Records budget it was wishful thinking. Luckily, Bonehead came up with a cheaper, brilliantly daft alternative: six TV sets wired up behind the stage, all running the same footage. With Roger Bickley’s (ex-ZODIAQUE UK) handy wiring skills and a £37 booster amp, it worked. A DIY multimedia extravaganza.

Steve Jones (of White Tygerz, Heroes on a Beach, Picture House, and nearly SOS himself at one point) handled the PA. We’d finished soundcheck by 9pm, but weren’t due on for another two and a half hours. That gap worried me. Robin was on his second pint, and I couldn’t shake the memory of the infamous PSST incident that ended in him facing seven charges. So I did the only sensible thing: I marched the lot of them back to mine to kill time.

When we returned to The Bistro the place was heaving — over 250 people, jammed into every corner. At £2 a head, that’s about £500 through the door, with £170 making its way into our pockets and the rest lining the Trehearns’ tills. Whatever my misgivings about playing Rhyl, that sight of the room buzzing with our people, our town, was special.

The set blurred past in a rush of noise, screens flickering behind us, all of us throwing ourselves into it. This was the Sons of Selina line-up in full: me on vocals, Robin, Martin and Bonehead wielding three guitars between them, Ken Maynardis on bass, Steve on keyboards, and Cumi on drums. It felt like a proper homecoming, even if it had taken us years to get there.

The next morning there was no time to bask in it. Delerium hauled us out of bed for a photo shoot, and those bleary-eyed pictures are now plastered all Kerrang!. Around the same time, the NME ran an ad for us in their small-ads section:

SONS OF SELINA: AVAILABLE FOR WEDDINGS, FUNERALS & CHILDREN’S PARTIES (WE NEITHER).

It still makes me laugh.

Sons Of Selina - The Archway Tavern, Islington

 

It was one of those nights that made me wonder what the fuck we were doing. Just a few weeks earlier we’d blasted through a live Radio One session, going out to millions. Now here we were, Sons of Selina, driving five hours down the M6 / M1 in a battered rental van that had cost us £127 in hire, deposit and diesel, only to end up playing to about 30 punters in a pub in Islington.

On the way home Martin missed the M6 turn-off and said, deadpan: “The other bands didn’t want to know us and we didn’t want to know them.” He was right. From the moment we walked into the Archway Tavern it felt like we’d wandered into someone else’s party uninvited. The other bands kept themselves to themselves, and so did we.

The set-up was odd. The pub had two bars, and while we were playing most of the regulars stayed in the other one, uninterested. We were hammering out our noise to a thin line of faces who didn’t quite know what to make of us. But gradually — maybe halfway through the set — a few heads started turning. By the end, people drifted in from the other bar, craning to see what the racket was, realising something was happening. We might have only had thirty new friends by the time we packed up, but they were our thirty.

As for the other bands — Mantaray weren’t bad, very Jam-influenced at the time, though I’ve since heard they morphed into an Oasis-type affair. Spitbaby, on the other hand, were unlistenable, so we sat in the bar while they did their thing and counted that as a tactical retreat.

The Sons’ line-up was in flux then: me on vocals, Robin and Martin on guitars, Bonehead on a third guitar, Ken Maynardis on bass, Cumi on drums, and Steve on keyboards, who gave the whole thing its oddball edge. We were a strange beast, half-punk, half-psychedelic, with too many guitars and too much beer, but we made it work.

On the long drive back north, slumped in the van, I asked myself out loud: “Was it really worth it? Worth the money, the miles, the effort to play to 30 people?” And then I answered myself: yeah. Because those 30 people got something real, and for an hour we made London ours. Besides, we even got paid £20 for it — so I guess we’re big-time now.

Live at the BBC: Sons of Selina Take on Studio 3

 

Martin, Steve Bonehead, Robin, Cumi, Ste Sync, myself and Ken

After weeks of waiting, the day had finally arrived. At 2pm, Steve Bonehead picked me up, and so began the chaotic dance of assembling people, instruments, and nerves for the 1 hour 15 minute drive to Manchester. Our destination loomed in the skyline — the unmistakable BBC building on Oxford Road, casting its shadow over us like a headmaster waiting to judge a late homework assignment.

We checked in, got our ID passes, and before heading into battle, made a quick dash across the road to Amigo’s, the overpriced Mexican place, for some food. I thought I was feeling the nerves — until I clocked Martin, who looked like he was ready to dissolve into his fajitas. True to form, ten minutes before we were due to go live, Martin quietly disappeared to the toilet, following Steve, who’d already made his own nervous pilgrimage just five minutes earlier.

Inside the BBC, I was pleased to see that the Sons of Selina sticker I’d slapped in the studio loos on a previous visit (back in September) was still stuck fast. It had since been joined by a proud colony of new ones — quiet, sticky proof of our ongoing guerilla marketing campaign.

We were ushered into Studio 3, also known as the Drama Studio, where we began the ritual of set-up with our sound engineers, Tony and Dave. Over the next hour and a half, mics were tested, cables untangled, and the three guitarists did their best to channel the spirit (and noise level) of Jimi Hendrix’s ghost. Eventually, we pulled it together and ran through the four tracks we’d be playing live on air that night.

Tony - the engineer

10:20pm — go time. You could practically hear seven sphincters tighten in unison as the red light went on. I had a quick on-air chat with Mark Radcliffe about Welsh football (as you do), took a cheeky dig at Delerium for being "chickenshits" about not releasing our first live track, and then — boom — we launched into Climb. Fueled by adrenaline, it was blisteringly fast — probably twice the speed it was supposed to be — but it was the best version we’d ever played. Every note was dead on. Honestly, that rush should be bottled and sold to junkies. We were flying.

About 45 minutes later, Radcliffe introduced Of The First Water, with Bonehead opening on the mellow guitar line. Again — perfect. After that came a longer interview segment, full of piss-taking and ridiculous banter. I even got Radcliffe squirming for cueing up Gamoto Manopano wrong the night before. Steve Sync and Lard then treated the nation to a bizarre monosynth duet, before we ripped into "For Want of a Better Name", which Radcliffe proudly called “blistering.”

Just before our final song, we heard that listeners were phoning in, trying to work out what “Sons of Selina” is an anagram of — no one got it (and no, I’m still not telling). Then came Terminus, just after 11:35pm. Midway through, Martin hit the wrong chord. It threw me, briefly — I was singing the line "Soon all the day of the imperial haze will be lost in the dark of the past" while inside my head was spiraling: Have we blown it? Was this the moment it all unravelled? But I pulled it together — told myself to snap out of it — and we powered through to the end.

After we’d gone off air, Rachel Elmet walked in and said, “That was brilliant. Did you say fucked?” Cue a room full of raised eyebrows. Apparently, the producer had rung down from upstairs, convinced someone had sworn live on Radio One. The engineers were all exchanging looks too. Turns out, they misheard the line “It’s a sad fact…” in "Terminus". I had to do some serious convincing that I hadn’t just dropped an F-bomb on national radio. For the record: I said fact, not facked. Only cockneys say that!

All in all, an incredible night. Pure energy. Live music how it’s meant to be — full of mistakes, adrenaline, banter, and magic.