The set list: Still In The Woodwork, Walls Come Down, The Flatstone, Bottle Drips Dry, Big Slam, Jaw Clamp Sunshine, Lynch Pin, Pawn Walk, Rose High, The Hub, Breaking Strain, Deeper Blue, Crowbar, Curfew, Unstable, Stop, Momentum, Old Style Drop Down, No Time For Talk, Burn Down That Village, Low Commotion.
Wednesday morning downstairs in Virgin Records on Sheffield High Street. The shop is open but no customers have yet made their way down to the albums department which dominates the basement. Lloyd Cole and his Commotions’ ‘Rattlesnakes’ is playing on the chunky new, front-loading compact disc player, which looks like a baby tumble-dryer. Hot mugs of tea and coffee are yet to be cleared from the shop counter as store manager Dave, his first lieutenant Haze, band-mate Paul (who recently joined the in-store team here) and myself conduct a post-mortem on last night's final gig by our band The Box.
Dave, who’s a massive Bruce Springsteen fan and, as usual, is wearing his trademark black Stetson indoors, couldn’t be more positive: “I really enjoyed it. I can’t believe you are packing it in.” Haze, who looks like a tie-dye Mr. Micawber, and I suspect has built a shrine to Jethro Tull at home, nods along enthusiastically and asks, “Yeah, why are you packing it in?" Paul and I look at each other ruefully, and I think to myself: Well, we’ve finally cracked it with the US rock and prog fans. What a pity we couldn’t convert more NME readers…
My reveries are broken by our first customer of the day, a bus-driver who’s a regular, buying the new Foreigner album. That’ll be £4.49, please.
- The bottle drips dry
A final prayer before playing: “Mother Rhythm, step forward and grant me, for one last time, the ebb and flow and the give and go. To be the constant anchor but also the chain that yields to the currents of my fellow players. Let me play in time and with time itself, to somehow suspend this moment so that it might stay with me forever.”
We’ve been tasting the tannins for a while. Two recent London gigs, at the Camden Palace in September and King’s College in October, told us that things were not going to plan. At the first gig, nominally a launch show for our new album, the famous Camden Palace more closely resembled the ransacked Winter Palace of St. Petersburg - cold and haunted and nobody there aside from a handful of hardcore Box Bolsheviks. You could have wintered a herd of yak on the dance floor and still had room for a bop. Last summer we were pulling a big crowd at The Ace in Brixton, where have that lot gone?
At King’s College we found ourselves on the bill with a bunch of miscreants and ne’er do wells called Flesh For Lulu, Lou Reed fans who’d spent too much time with their girlfriends’ hair crimpers and eyeliner. We’ve played with Goth bands before – Play Dead, Xmal Deutschland, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry – and the fans of these bands do not like The Box. They do like Nick Cave, but we appear to be The Birthday Party that no-one wants to go to.
- (Great moments in) Big Slam
The title track from our second album. I love playing this one live. It’s slow and spacious, unlike most of our other songs, which rattle along at full pelt for 300 seconds and then stop abruptly. There’s a bit in the middle of ‘Big Slam’ where it’s just me drumming and Pete singing and I say to myself: Don’t cock it up here, Rog, you’ll feel more exposed than a scab at Maltby Main pit.
The album release had been delayed due to the NME strike, which lasted for eight weeks in the summer of 1984. Our label boss Andy MacDonald had done a brilliant job of promoting our debut releases in 1983, especially given that Go! Discs was basically just Andy and his sister Alison. Also vital to the success of the campaign had been the support of the NME. The magazine was selling upwards of 200,000 copies every week, and the consensus was we should wait until it was back on the streets. The reward for our patience? An so-so 7/10 review with a photograph. Strategically speaking, not exactly a big slam, more of a minor incursion.
- Pawn Walk
We’re about a third of the way into our set now and we’re playing well. The gig is being recorded for a future live release and Pete, Paul, Charlie and Terry are all firing with passion and precision. I think it’s the biggest crowd we’ve ever pulled at The Leadmill, and the audience is warming up nicely. It’s amazing how many fans we seem to suddenly have now we’ve said we’re closing The Box for good.
We’ve decided to play a lot of new songs that we’ve written for a third album that now will never be recorded, and ‘Pawn Walk’ is one of those. I love playing this one too. Like ‘Big Slam’, it’s another slow track that ebbs and flows ominously before a punchy chorus and haunting sax refrain from Charlie. I’m playing away, dreaming of the Spanish guitar and castanets I can hear in my head for the recorded studio version. Then I remember that won’t be happening and I’m back in The Leadmill, happy to be locked in this seductive groove while feeling sad for things that will now never be. I’ll also miss the brutal skewering I’d have got from my band-mates, had I shared my flamenco fantasies.
The Box has never had a manager. For better or worse, we looked after ourselves in ClockDVA and, being fiercely independent, we saw no reason to change anything with the new band. I admire Crass. Not only for their politics but their uncompromising position on everything from artwork to ticket prices. Likewise, the new American punk bands such as the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag release their music on their own labels, defiantly marching to the beat of their own hectic snares. In the world of jazz, apparently, Duke Ellington did everything: arranger, band-leader, booker, travel agent, doctor and paymaster general to fifteen superb but often errant band members. If the grand old Duke and the snotty young punks can do it, then so can we.
One day at band rehearsal, Paul tells us he’s had a call from Tritec Music, the Birmingham-based managers of Duran Duran, asking if we have representation. And we all fall about laughing. What on earth could the managers of one the biggest new bands in the world possibly do for an uncompromising gang of gritty street warriors like us? And anyway, we don’t need a manager because we have Andy MacDonald, hustling on our behalf like his livelihood depends on it, which it does.
Or rather did. The label is called Go! Discs and Andy is a go-getter. He learned his craft at legendary punk rock label Stiff Records and knows that to be successful he’s got to keep an eye out for exciting new talent. Laurels are for headstones, baby. His A&R skills are paying off with the signing and immediate success of Billy Bragg, a young solo artist who sings with an Estuary English accent, accompanied by his own scratchy electric guitar. He’s managed by an older guy called Peter Jenner, who apparently used to guide Pink Floyd.
When I visited the Go! Offices in Chiswick last summer there was a real buzz about the place, with people named Porky, Wiggy and Wendy May coming and going. Andy has a demo-tape of a band he likes from Hull called The Housemartins. To me, it’s no coincidence that Go is also a board game, in which the objective is to capture more territory than your opponent. To help him achieve his goals, Andy has done a sales, marketing and distribution deal with Chrysalis Records, the home to Spandau Ballet, Billy Idol and Pat Benatar. This arrangement has already delivered a Top 20 album for Billy Bragg, and this is in the national UK charts, the big boy's chart, not the more niche, specialist independent charts. The latter is the more natural habitat for a band like The Box; it’s the first one I look at in the music papers. But it increasingly looks to me as if we’re a small piece that has been sacrificed as part of a bigger game.
Andy himself remains utterly charming, helpful and supportive. We owe him a lot. However, as I spend time behind the counter in the Virgin shop, listening to the record label reps with their relentless sales patter, a phrase I hear a lot is: “this is a priority for us.” I have a funny feeling that, without our own Peter Jenner going out to bat for us, I’m unlikely to hear that anytime soon in relation to The Box.
- Deeper Blue
We’re past the halfway point now, arguably playing as well as we ever have live. Box songs are succinct and to the point. No more so than ‘Deeper Blue’, which gallops along like Captain Beefheart taking the reins in the ‘Ben Hur’ chariot race. “We’ve written a single,” reckoned Paul and Pete when they brought this new song into the rehearsal room. And sure enough, we could all see its potential. Pete’s lyrics went straight for the jugular, a damning take-down of Thatcher’s Britain, supported by a crisp, deliberate, undeniably catchy rhythm track. Tonight at The Leadmill, ‘Deeper Blue’ is surging along on a pounding 4/4 tidal bore of a beat. Through the beads of sweat I think I can see people in the crowd dancing.
Hear ye this. Nothing good ever came out of the sentence, “Kajagoogoo have canceled studio time.” Paul got a call from Andy. Limahl & Co. have pulled out of a session at Jacobs in Surrey, and the studio are offering it at a bargain rate. A van is quickly hired, and we head off down south to record 'Deeper Blue', the new song that we reckon might transform The Box from doughty mid-table combatants to genuine gold-plated promotion candidates.
Hopes that El Dorado has been quietly twinned with nearby Aldershot end in disappointment. Three days in the studio at Jacobs’ and no-one likes the newly recorded 'Deeper Blue'. It's too slow. Stodgy and stilted when it should be fearless and vehement. And the label still needs to pay for the studio time. Andy puts on a brave face, but 'Deeper Blue' has put us deeper in debt.
- No Time For Talk
Good old No Time For Talk. Paul, Charlie and myself brought you with us from ClockDVA, when you were called ‘Don’t Listen To Mother’, another single that never was. At this stage of the set, we’re a runaway train - limitless fuel to burn in the firebox, and the brakes are off. The footplate is a dance floor on which Pete hops and jerks like a furious Pinocchio, looking to remonstrate with whichever gormless Geppetto cut him loose in this world. Meanwhile Charlie, his new skinhead crop at odds with his thick, bushy beard, screams out the saxophone line in the chorus, as Paul – terse and businesslike – weighs in, sizing up then chopping up the rhythm guitar with an executioner’s feel for the guillotine. Terry and I just keep shovelling coal on the fire. The air in the room is thick with smoke and sweat. The statues who stood before us just an hour ago are now a melted mess of nodding heads, flailing arms and restless feet.
“It’s goodnight from The Box!” yells Pete, as we exit stage right.
This bed is entirely of our construction. When we made it after the DVA split in the summer of 1981, we hoped it might transport us to the land of dreams. Nearly four years on and the mattress springs are poking through, we’ve been gnawed by bugs and the frame is showing signs of rust. The scrapyard beckons.
You’ll hear no Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop from these lips. Beefheart fans to a man, all we wanted to be was a magic band, but now we’re bereft of spells.
I think we’ll stay friends. Unlike most bands, The Box isn’t breaking up due to musical differences. Really it’s indifference to our music. Paul, who came up here from London in 1978 to study at the university, has a life away from Sheffield and the band. Pete moved his young family from Hertfordshire to be part of The Box. With that kind of early commitment, I just know he’s going to dedicate his life to the creative arts, whether he is commercially successful or not. Likewise Charlie, who first came to DVA from the world of free improvised music. He’s such a great player that he can return to that scene and be warmly embraced, regaling his jazz pals with entertaining tales of the many idiots he encountered in the world of pop. Terry will be Terry, up for a party after the pub, a nice guy who’ll always find a gig in a working band.
When I’ve met musicians and artists who are completely dedicated to their work, such as Pete, Charlie and then the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle and even U2, I can tell these people are not like me. They are all lifers, and they are in it for the long run with a determination that borders on the vocational.
As for me, I have a sad vision of a 40-year-old drummer, still sitting in the back of a freezing Ford Transit van amidst a pile of amps and drums, on the road to Hull for a Christmas gig at The Adelphi, adrift in the 21st century. Ultimately, I don’t want to be that person.
No time for talk. The band is over. Now is the time for action, not words. But what am I going to do now?
Thank you to Nigel Floyd, Paul Widger and Charlie Collins.
Highlights from The Leadmill concert recording was released by Doublevision in 1985. An expanded version was released on CD in 2015. Here is a Spotify playlist of that album.
