How did the Read the Fanzine club night come about?
On Thursday December 22nd 2005 I met up with Tris, a friend and ex-colleague for a pre-Christmas drink in London's west end. I'd no way of knowing the adventure that lay ahead.
For some reason we decided it would be fun to try and blag our way into the private members club at the Phoenix theatre on Charring Cross Road. And this was BEFORE we'd had a drink!
We managed to get in and perhaps the theatrical atmosphere influenced us to start the night, who knows?
I'd been to Steve Lamacq's Punk Rock Karaoke night in Islington. It was just like any other karaoke night except instead of warbling over a pre-recording of a session musician playing some cheesy tune on a cheap synth whilst watching a vomit inducing low budget video, instead you warble over a real live punk band - and rather good they were too!
We got to discussing whether or not he made much money out of it. I reckoned that between the venue hire, paying the band and so on, he wouldn't make very much - and there wasn't really the scope to take it to a bigger venue as already there were more people wanting to go up and sing than was feasible in a night, so I concluded that he must do it for fun.
Following the music theme we got to talking about how the term Indie has lots all trace of meaning and how nights were calling themselves Indie then playing stuff like The Killers that is already played to death all day on radio.
At the time in the office we had the radio on all day, and I became increasingly frustrated at how often songs were repeated - I've counted hearing the same some anything up to 8 times in a day if I worked late - and sometimes for months on end, day in day out.
The idea of hearing these same dozen or so songs again in a club at night was far from appealing to me.
Then we got onto C-86 and how most of the bands disappeared without trace - the only ones that went on to success were the ones that changed their style radically and joined the dance music movement of the time.
I mused that if stations such as XFM and BBC 6 Music had been around in the C-86 era then many of these artists would have gone on to bigger things, and today people would know what you are talking about when you say C-86 (for those in the dark, it was actually a free tape given away with NME but it came to be the label attached to a scene that came about in 1986 where an explosion of new bands came along, mainly playing jangly pop and thoughtful lyrics, who signed to real Indie labels).
Boys Don't Cry by the Cure had been played on BBC 6 Music when I was in the office a few days previous, and one of the girls who was in her mid 20s had never heard it before and couldn't believe that it was originally released in 1979 "because it sounded so fresh and now". That'll be where today's bands are getting their inspiration from then!
I pointed out that there must be loads of lost gems that people would go for now if only they got the chance to hear them.
Well all these random conversations were mixed together in my brain and then came my Eureka moment - "Why don't we hire that venue that Steve Lamacq uses and do a DJ night where we play lost treasures all night".
Tris liked the idea - so much so that he immediately went off to buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate!