As Is Mk. 2
September 1989 - January 1991
I am always astonished by the brevity of this band's life. Mind you, perhaps it was a little longer; As Is mk. 1 split in March 89 and my summer was spent recruiting and rehearsing. So September 1989 was the point at which we announced ourselves and played our first gigs. "Ourselves" was now: - me, Shane Kirk (guitar/vocals), Ross Geraghty (bass/vocals) and Malcolm Hawkes (drums/vocals). We squeezed a hell of a lot into those months, and I'll do my best to remember some of it...
Ross came first, he was (I think it's fair to say) a fan of As Is mk. 1 and a charismatic bass player of great talent and precision. In the early days he was my only real support on the backing vocals and worked very hard to fill in for the dynamic duo of Paul Read & Steven Mears - a stiff task for two people let alone one. Ross had had previous associations with Malcolm, who was then drumming with 'This Side Of Summer', a charming punk-pop four-piece from Ipswich, who I adored, not least for the honey-dripped vocals of Liz Jarrold. Malcolm and Ross had developed a rhythmic understanding between themselves, and blended beautifully together without any help or trouble.
Shane was living in Grimsby, trying to make sense of a difficult relationship, a daily drive across the Humber Bridge at rush-hour and the fact that he was in Grimsby. I received a postcard begging "Get me out of here!". We had auditioned another guitarist - Matt Wimpress (also of This Side of Summer), but I had less reservations about Shane than I did about Matt, so we invited him down.
The rhythm section and I had spent the summer ripping the guts out of and decorating an old four-berth caravan, which lived in the corner of a meadow on my dad's farm, about three miles from Ipswich town centre. I had negotiated a supply of electricity to the site with Father, and apart from the odd spit and crackle when it was damp, it all worked rather well. We practised two or three times a week, liberated from the expense accrued by hired rehearsal space in town, and inspired by the clean countryside surroundings of our new hidey-hole. We could record, rehearse and occasionally sleep there with no bother. The people living in surrounding houses weren't terribly keen some nights, but we kept adding sound-proofing until the furore died down.
The other three lads had the difficult task of learning to replicate the old As Is, we had gigs booked in Denmark and Sweden so there was no time to faff about writing new stuff. Malcolm in particular struggled to do anything other than what Paul Read had done, partly due to familiarity but also perhaps out of reverence to Paul, who had become one of the most respected drummers around. Ross had a more aggressive approach to bass-ing than Steven Mears, with a much fatter sound and a more basic style (less fiddly bits!). Shane only knew how to play guitar one way...Shane's way. This bothered me (and Malcolm & Ross), but in the end it worked out rather well, particularly when we started writing our own stuff. For the moment, if Shane couldn't master a particular bit of a song, he stuck to root notes or just stopped playing! No worries! The end result was that it wasn't better or worse, just different. The lads were rather cruelly stitched up at our second gig when the all of the escapees from As Is mk.1 line-up turned up to listen. This seemed to terrify Malcolm & Ross more than anything else I ever saw them face, but they performed with aplomb, and we made it home intact just in time to leave for Denmark.
The Danish shows had come about because of my then girlfriend, Vibeke. Her dad knew someone who wanted an English band to play during Britisk Uge In Nordjylland (British Week In North Jutland). I suppose we were part of the 'youth' portion of this cultural exchange that featured everything from Motocross to Bagpipe bands, via fashion and cake manufacturers. We had four gigs booked over a period of seven days, and had independently booked a gig in Sweden some five days after the last of these, via a friend in Gothenburg called Gunilla. On reflection we probably shouldn't have done the last one because it gave us so much time to spend all the money we'd earned from the other four - 5000 DKr per show! We took along tireless Dave 'Tigger' Turner for his roadie-ing skills (and because he fancied a holiday), Chris Yapp to look after the sound and Matthias Groth, a Hamburger who had been the most sensible driver on The Adicts' German tour that I'd been involved in previously, who also knew how to operate lighting rigs. No-one got paid really, we just existed en masse, eating as cheaply and infrequently as possible. Matthias did all the driving as long as he had "Benzine, zigaretten und beef jerky - you must look after ze driver!".
The first highlight of the tour has to be the performance on the boat on the way over. A gang of what looked like woodwork teachers from Liverpool were the band-in-residence on the boat, performing a set of Merseybeat golden oldies with authentic scouse accents. They were bored and drunk enough to let us on stage for one song - 'Another Happy Birthday'. We were treated to the sight of Danes aged anything from 12 to 90 unsteadily tripping the light fantastic to one of a pair of new songs on a choppy North Sea. Surreal. Afterwards Shane was pursued by two women, one a sprightly octogenarian who he had a quick boogie with, the other a pretty and enthusiastically old for her age 13 year old, who when asked what time she had to get back to her parents' cabin replied "In time for breakfast". Needless to say she was escorted back undefiled several hours early. They just don't care, those Danes.
The gigs themselves were a mixed bag, from massive halls with the best PA possible but sadly no people, to smaller halls with lots of fourteen-year-olds who seemed to be able to take us or leave us really. We do have a nice live recording from a gig in Svenstrup, near Aalborg where we played our socks off mainly for the benefit of the largest and best crew we'd ever had the pleasure of working with and a couple of dozen punters.
Our base-camp during all this was sleeping bags on the floors of some bare rooms in a community centre in Aalborg, where we were basically left to do what we wanted. We had a 'minder' called Fleming who proudly declared himself "a meat 'n' potatoes kinda guy", he was as interested in getting drunk as we all were, so the relationship worked well. We made frequent trips to Jomfru Annegade in the town centre. This was (and still is) Aalborg's main drinking street, it was open 24 hours a day and bands appeared on stage at 4am - very civilised to us over-licensed Brits! We would straggle back from these excursions and play cricket in one of the rooms at the centre. Fairly early on Chris, ever resourceful, found a mobile bar in one of the cupboards, complete with a full keg of beer and dispense equipment. That made the cricket more fun. Our hosts simply must have known about our pilfering...but they never said anything.
On other nights we played around a fire out in the quadrangle which marked the centre of the complex. We'd found a double bass in one of the rooms, so that got used in these camp-fire sessions, which often involved a theatre-troupe from Bristol who were sleeping in their camper-van somewhere else on the site, having been similarly drafted in for Britisk Uge. So we had a whale of a time and spent all the money before going over to Sweden for all of ten hours, to play a storming set at Café Hängmatten in front of 40 enthusiastic but polite Swedes. The place was tiny and due to Sweden's draconian beer laws had a license only for low alcohol beers. I stuck to the coffee. Good show, but I made the fatal error of referring to Ross as "the spotty one with the hat" onstage. I didn't realise until some years later just how much that hurt him, and it's a source of much regret even now. Straight after the gig, we drove down to Esbjerg for the following day's ferry back to Harwich. Dave Turner, in an act of kindness typical of the man, bought a crate of Carlsberg Elephant Beer for everyone to share on the ferry, the collective purse now thoroughly empty. The first chapter of the As Is mk. 2 story was concluded.
Much more to follow....eventually.
Here are some repositories of free demos and things to listen to or download:
http://soundcloud.com/lordtilkey/sets/1990-asis-etc-1/
http://soundcloud.com/egdirtrap/sets/more-juicy-as-is-goodness/
Music Index Bloody Fingers Cyclo-Hexane The Retarded Panorama In Black Bane As Is mk. 1 The Adicts