Utter insanity: The Pointy Birds strike a pose
IT was a childhood immersed in good British rock and pop – and it gave Andy Macleod a burning need to see his title in lights and his self-penned music on the high of the charts.
And now the hilarious warts-and-all story of a Britpop band whose large ambitions didn’t match their skills is instructed in Anoint My Head, a memoir that tracks the life and occasions of early 90s guitar combo, The Pointy Birds.
Being in a pop band was a childhood dream for Kentish City-based Andy.
“All this enjoyable was encapsulated each Thursday evening on Prime of the Pops,” he writes.
Pop music by no means let him down, he says: from disco and punk to the New Romantics, then on to the likes of The Smiths, Dexys Midnight Runners, Insanity, The Conflict, The Jam, The Stranglers….
“My youth consisted of band after band after band,” he recollects.
“12 months after yr after yr, hit after hit after hit…”
After which got here a brand new wave of politically charged, anarchic comedy. From Rik Mayall and The Younger Ones to Steve Martin’s decade-defining movies equivalent to The Man With Two Brains, Andy’s infatuations meant he felt it was predetermined he would both be a singer or comic – or a mixture of the 2.
The Pointy Birds on stage
Both method, he’d do gigs, get found after which swan about rocking stadiums or theatres within the evenings adopted by throwing TVs by means of resort home windows within the early hours. None of this ever occurred – and in his memoir, he wonders why.
“When penning this ebook I used to be attempting, with hindsight, to look again and see what went incorrect,” he says. “I needed to relive these days, revive the recollections.”
And The Pointy Birds noticed their contemporaries make it large – they have been within the wave of acts that produced the likes of Suede and Blur.
“Music-wise, that point produced such a great classic,” he says. “We have been round bands that went on to have large success – whereas we didn’t. They only went proper previous us.”
The Pointy Birds was a undertaking that bought getting in earnest after Andy had completed what he describes as “dossing about at college”. He needed to, as his dad put it, undergo a interval of “de-studentification” to ease into the “actual” world. He bought a job at Soho file store Selectadisc, and moved right into a grotty flat in Golders Inexperienced, the place his buddy, the “never-played-a-note-before” bassist Marcus, did what he might to grasp the instrument and rustle up the identical enthusiasm as Andy for his or her self-penned songs. The Marcus in query later has earned a public profile in Camden – as a Labour councillor.
Their flat has The Younger Ones written throughout it: it was perilously squalid, that includes a damaged entrance door and filth brought on by younger males extra involved with ingesting the bottle of sickly candy Kaddish wine they present in a cabinet than trying to do the washing up.
Andy Macleod
However their neighbours confirmed no concern {that a} band of restricted musical capacity would rehearse of their entrance room, the hire was low-cost and, better of all for Andy, it was simply 4 Tube stops to Camden City. “My first impression of Camden had been one among slight disappointment – random retailers on a excessive avenue. And never very good ones – leather-based coat retailers, tattoo parlours and Irish pubs, however when you needed to something to do with music this was the place to be,” he writes.
“Everybody regarded like they have been in a band, or needed to be in a band, or appreciated going to see bands.
“It was enjoyable aimlessly wandering round Camden market, absorbing the ambiance, like we have been in a giant playground or a movie set, and though it was grotty and smelly, I wouldn’t need to be wherever else… it was a pure place to ponder and daydream about future success.”
The ebook walks us by means of varied line-ups, from roping in siblings to using an enthusiastic drummer (a neighbour who had admired their music although the partitions) however who, damningly, had completely no sense of time. We hear of how a College of London leisure officer known as Ricky Gervais, who was all the time telling gags, managed them and bought studio time and reveals. Ricky, in fact, was one other modern, who in contrast to the Birds, went on to turn into well-known…
Andy relates the tales of the gigs that ought to have been the massive breaks, and those that would have been however have been not directly mucked up by forces past their management (just like the time Andy earned an viewers’s ridicule after tangling his hair in a harmonica holder).
Different escapades included a gig in his Sussex house city, the place he had his triumphant return was stolen by a facet attraction: The Birds had added a hairdresser who labored beneath their flat to the line-up – however he didn’t play an instrument. He was, nonetheless, into martial arts and thrilled the gang with feats of power and acrobatics, which included ruining the Birds’ ultimate track by main the viewers right into a pub automotive park so he might present how he might soar over all 4 band members on the identical time.
Andy’s memoir is a lot enjoyable, it offers a hefty silver lining to the very fact they by no means made it. However the dream hasn’t gone utterly. Andy admits he nonetheless would love a crack on the limelight.
“Perhaps my ebook shall be made into a movie,” he wonders. “Harry Types might play me.”
- Anoint My Head: How I Failed To Make It As A Brit-Pop Indie Rock Star. By Andy Macleod, Pointy Books, £9.99.
