1985

I had become friends with Gary Burroughs, a drummer friend of Terry's, and we had had a few plays, we found a rehearsal place called Riverside near the rivers hull/humber conjunction and things fell back together again. We started on 4.5.85 with me on guitar, sax and voice, Mr. Rudeforth on radio, Terry on bass and Gary playing the drums. I tried to get Mark to come along, he wasn't interested but he took a bit from a tape I lent him and overdubbed some vocals to create 'Let's all be the billowing gut of an ageing giraffe'. He turned up one night and played guitar and sang, joining in with the swapping of instruments and helping us create an amazing hour-long medley of popular songs. As we were leaving I said "fantastic, you're back", he replied "I won't be coming again" and never did. I used to spend all my money in the boozer beforehand and hid behind the amps until Bill (the owner) had given up trying to collect. In the end we knew someone who had a set of keys and went in at midnight after the previous band had left. We regularly played til 5 or 6 am. We had a friend called 'Noddy' and I can remember chasing him around the room with a power tool on a long extension cable. Terry had a friend called Ian Cravan, he came one night and was really nervous but at some point went up to a mic and started doing vocals. It was absolutely amazing with his stream-of-consciousness rants etc and he got really into doing it, never having done anything like it before. I once lent 3 tapes to Johnny Tasker and Dave Stead (who had the spare keys and was also the drummer in the Luddites and later the Beautiful South) and they 'lost' them and weren't particularly sorry in a shrug-your-shoulders kind of way. Mr. Stead doesn't realise how close he came to be on the receiving end of 'Mad Moller' and serious injury. He once walked past my gate just after joining The Beautiful South and I just said "Paul Heaton's Bum-Boy!" at him. Towards the end our improvisations had become so tight that it was as if some of it had been worked-out beforehand. We played for 23 weeks and did a gig at the Adelphi Club on 7.11.85. After that I couldn't even manage to get all 5 of us in one room for a meeting. A big problem was that Gary and Terry both had regular Fri/Sat/Sun club gigs drumming, it was how they made some money and it was always "oh, we can't do gigs on a weekend" or "I can only do 1 night a week" or somesuch pish. I wanted to carry on with Ian and Mr. R. but Ian wasn't very confident. So once again What Katy Did Next disintegrated into the ever-beckoning void...