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.
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