Another time was a gig in Lincoln, we got to the nightclub early (its name escapes me), set up and went to grab some food. During
the walkabout we came across some poor soul who had been beaten senseless in the middle of a pedestrianised area. It turned out that
he had fallen foul of a local family of thugs who, guess what, yup, decided to go to the nightclub we were playing at. We arrived
to find quite a few people in, with the thugs, about a dozen of them, sat to one side of the stage. Sensing trouble, the ordinary
punters soon disappeared leaving us playing to the thugs who very quickly decided it would be fun to throw empty beer glasses at Mick
the drummer, so every time a glass shattered on his drum kit he turned to them and told them to fuck off, which just seemed to heighten
tensions!
Eventually, being a 3 piece with 2 roadies we decided to cut our losses, shortened the set and started packing up very
quickly, all the while getting heckled by the cavemen in the corner...but we all kept a mic stand close to hand just in case. Not
a pleasant experience at all but we did survive unscathed, although I'm still not sure how.
FRM: You've done your fair share
of recording John - what would you say has been your most satisfying project?
JC: With me playing on it, without a doubt
the Watch This Space project with Graham Hibbitt, more on that later. I do tend to be a bit of a hoarder so I've got loads of old
demos, portastudio recordings, live and rehearsal recordings to sift through from all stages of my playing "career", if that's what
it can be called which will be fun to put together one day. I did start the process a few years ago and had compiled a full CD of
tweaked & mastered Dolz House material and then Rik accidentally formatted the hard drive!! Since then I've not had the
heart or the time to start the process again...just yet!
At one point I was working a bit with Terry Wincott from Amazing Blondel in
his studio and contributed to a few sessions for people which turned out really well - there's quite a few recordings kicking around
from that period alone. Dave Norman and myself were also working on an album at one point which never got finished, but there was
some cool stuff on that which would be nice to complete one day.
Before FULC became a full band, Rik and Kook (drummer) had
an instrumental project called FULK and they actually recorded 2 full albums worth of interesting drum & bass/Prodigy type
stuff which I contributed to on guitar on a couple of tracks. All the multi tracks were lost in the formatting incident but at least
we have master copies of each album...I'll have to ask Rik about that. Actually, working with FULC on their material and going into
Sawmills and Chapel Studios to record their albums was a great experience, same can be said for [sub]NOVA when they went into Axis
Studios in Doncaster - being part of the creative process outside of being a musician was more rewarding than I anticipated.
FRM:
The excellent "Watch This Space" collaboration with Graham Hibbitt was something of a departure for you - how did that come about?
JC: I
first met Graham in the late 80's and used to go across to Grimsby once a week for a jam in a local rehearsal studio. We had a lot
in common musically and it was a great way to explore things on guitar and really stretch my playing. We had lots of ideas which we
used to bang down on a portastudio, then Illicit/Animal House started up in the early 90's and the work with Graham was put on
hold for a while due to the number of gigs we were doing with the band - 3 or 4 a week at the time. When that folded in '96
it turned out that Graham had built his own little project studio so we set out to do some decent recordings and have something to
show for our efforts.
So over a period of about 18 months we wrote, arranged and recorded all the material that finally made it onto "Enter", the first
album by Watch This Space. It was a proggy/rock instrumental affair. Bearing in mind that it represents about 3 hours of work per
week over that 18 month period we were both really pleased with the finished product - it could have been better in many ways
but we decided not to dabble too much and leave it in a fairly raw state. We sold quite a lot of copies initially and we have recently
released it for digital download via Stunted Records and our distributor. Interestingly, one of the tracks was our own version of
an obscure Bill Nelson instrumental called "Every Moment Infinite" from his "Practically Wired" album - it was chosen to be included
on an American double CD set called "My Secret Studio - a fan tribute to Bill Nelson" which was released to coincide with Bill's 50th
birthday, and Bill kindly granted us permission to include it on the Watch This Space album. The track is currently on our Watch This
Space MySpace profile.
At the time we were fairly spurred on by the response we got to it so we started work on a follow up called
"Inside". That has been 90% complete since around 2001 but then the whole Stunted Records & Management thing started and it's
just soaked up so much time that the final 10% has been waiting ever since, although between us we have made a commitment to finish
the album by the end of this year, so it's a question of Watch This Space as they say! And then we'll start something new...........
FRM:
A lot of your time, as you say, is now taken up by Stunted Records & Management - tell us about that.
JC:
In 2001 when FULC won the Rock Open and had recorded the "Void" demo it became apparent that they had no idea how to get gigs
outside the area or move things forward, so we started to get involved on a loose management basis. Within 3 months we had 3 recording
offers for the band, small to medium sized labels, but offers all the same. I was busy booking gigs while Jill was negotiating the
contract with Revolver Records (Stone Roses etc). When that broke down at the last minute we decided to set up our own label and Stunted
Records & Management was born in 2002.
Up to 2005 we just had the one band, FULC, and released 3 records by them -The Fallen EP, Biting Insomnia and Embrace. Destroy. During that time they were playlisted on R1, played around 250 gigs and toured
Germany where the albums had been released just before they split, so we were kept busy. Their last couple of gigs at The Imp and
also in Leeds and Hull were pretty mental and the final night of their German tour was in front of 400/500 very enthusiastic Germans
at a gig near Leipzig. They played so many great gigs, never achieved what they really deserved and disappeared with a bit of a whimper
but I'm still proud of what they did.
When the split happened we decided that we had too much time invested to give up so we
started actively looking for other bands who came in the shape of [sub]NOVA and Ten Seconds Of Chaos. The same year we got invited
to an international music conference/festival called by:Larm in Norway where we came across rock band Kite. Their album "Bring
Out Your Dead" was released digitally as they weren't able to tour over here, so a physical release became impractical.
In 2006
we attended by:Larm again and came across screamo punk band Desperado who blew us away with their performance, honesty and professionalism.
The band toured over here in 2006 to support our album release of "Beauty is the First Victim".
