It can’t have escaped your notice that once a band achieves some sort of recognition everyone forever more wants to read about them. We all relish the dirt that band biographies unearth; we adore tales of excellent excess and languidly licentious lows. These biographies offer us a voyeur’s glimpse into a world we will never know, a glimmer of glamour far beyond our reach.
To me these insalubrious incitements to imagine the hedonistic highs of heroes often seem vapid and lacking in what I consider a crucial ingredient; the meat behind the meteoric rise to fame. Upon completing the absorption of a rock biography I find myself casting down the book both physically and in my opinions. I want to know how these eagles of excess rose to mount their cultural pedestals; a mere detail glossed over by all band biographies. The authors and editors of such books assume us content and grateful to be placated with a paragraph detailing the salient facts, they hold back their arsenal of salacious details, only allowing us to gorge upon them later in their tall told tales.
It’s probably because I’ve played in bands since I first upgraded from the imaginary strumming of a tennis racket to the imagined intricacies of the bass guitar that I so want only and unashamedly crave the minute details of a band’s early existence. As a teen I absorbed all tales of tattered triumph in these tracts as if they were more instructional manuals than unit shifting journalistic palliatives. It’s a cliché well trodden and retold by every musician to offer up themselves to the altar of creative altercation that is the stage, but ever since I was young enough to remember considering girls were stinky I wanted to be a rock star.
But how? Answering the school careers officer’s career questioning with the firm and unyielding reply that I wished to make my way in the world through the pursuit of loudly performed rock perfection earned me only raised eyebrows and slow sighs that told tales of the considered fruitless feckless nature of such a path. When I was at school there was no pamphlet prescribed for the pursuit of a place in the Pantheon of rock godliness. Sure, if you were a classical (aka real) musician there was a sliver of hope in your aspirations to pay the bills with a life of concerts and creativity, but if you desired to develop as a professional electrical musician the advice of the careers officer was entirely absent. And so after my perennial persistence of being in a band I found myself on what my careers officer considered a comparable compromise; I was enrolled on a nursing course. I was destined to forgo the baying of the hungry crowd for the bedpan of strangers aching bowels.
So you’ll perhaps understand that in finding regular sources absent in their knowledge of how I might climb the ladder of rock I turned to these band biographies. I was in search of tangible titbits of advice that might launch me toward where I wished to be. Time after time my search was in vain; no advice was gifted to me from these pages. There was no three step plan to greatness, there were no hints at how to crack the scene, there was no practical pointers to aid me in my quest.
As I mentioned earlier most books on bands cover the early days as if they were an unfortunate ailment that should not be discussed in polite company. They will briefly mention that after three years of gigging the band was spotted and propelled skyward towards their place in the rock and roll hall of fame. Surely that seems simplistic, even to those of us who don’t indulge in the fruitlessly damaging drug that is dreaming of stardom? Would the biography of a great political leader mention only briefly a day or two of the subject’s youth before leaping forward to the day their achievements were rewarded in the Queen’s new years honours?
The early careers of all those who achieve greatness have a remarkable and definite bearing on making them who they are at the moment they achieve said greatness. For a chap like Winston Churchill it was the grotesque failure of campaigns in his charge (like the bloodbath that was Gallipoli in World War One) that became a jigsaw piece in the complex puzzle that formed the man that helped steer allied victory in World War Two. Should an eager young history degree student gloss over Churchill’s pre-WW2 life in a dissertation then I’m sure he’d achieve something less than worthy of his time in the hallowed halls of academia.
So why when it comes to great bands do we turn our attention away from the years they spend slogging their glorious guts out before they ascend into our collective consciousness? It’s these early years of disappointment and obscurity that crushes and manipulates bands into those beat driven beasts we love. There’s some truth to the fact that often a band’s first album is more impassioned than those that follow it. The first album a band releases could well take two or three years to write, years of rewriting, polishing and perfecting, all done in punishing poverty and the constant belittling nonchalance of the world at large. Should a band be propelled into stratospheric stardom with their first major release their second album will most likely be written without the benefit of self doubt and the fears of failure that fuelled their first fantastic foray. The logic follows that a second album written during drug and champagne fuelled orgies in five star hotels may lack the grit and urgency of its predecessor. And prescribed cliché calls this the difficult second album.
The hard lessons learned before a band breaks through entirely dictate the type of band they will be, it also cements or sullies the relationships between band members that develop during these awkward early years. During their first few years bands develop the awesome siege spirit that protects and envelops them both creatively and practically.
Not all bands make it past awkward obscurity; in fact the vast majority of bands never make it. Succeeding in a band is less likely than succeeding in a lottery, and at least playing the lottery is considerably cheaper and undeniably less hassle than playing in a band. For every million selling band there are a million bands that will never sell. I believe the torrid tales of the terminally tenebrous are no less fascinating and entertaining than those of their breakthrough brethren. Here I will tell you the tale of a band that never made it, a band that never troubled the charts or nibbled the elbow of awesomeness. I will divulge the details of a band that existed for over a decade and utterly consumed the lives of those involved; both the players and the supporting cast. What follows is the tale of Junk Culture – a band that owned my soul for most of my adult young life. A band that I left my job for, a job I faced brutal violence for, a true band of brothers. Junk Culture was a band untroubled by the pressures and expectations of fans (for we had none). We were unhindered by the obstacle of creativity that is the symbiant of success. A band with a cavalier attitude to talent, and only a nodding familiarity with striving for success. You’ll laugh, you’ll pity us, but most of all hopefully you’ll empathise and enjoy this tale, whether you are involved in a band of your own or not. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, a tale of Junk Culture.
To me these insalubrious incitements to imagine the hedonistic highs of heroes often seem vapid and lacking in what I consider a crucial ingredient; the meat behind the meteoric rise to fame. Upon completing the absorption of a rock biography I find myself casting down the book both physically and in my opinions. I want to know how these eagles of excess rose to mount their cultural pedestals; a mere detail glossed over by all band biographies. The authors and editors of such books assume us content and grateful to be placated with a paragraph detailing the salient facts, they hold back their arsenal of salacious details, only allowing us to gorge upon them later in their tall told tales.
It’s probably because I’ve played in bands since I first upgraded from the imaginary strumming of a tennis racket to the imagined intricacies of the bass guitar that I so want only and unashamedly crave the minute details of a band’s early existence. As a teen I absorbed all tales of tattered triumph in these tracts as if they were more instructional manuals than unit shifting journalistic palliatives. It’s a cliché well trodden and retold by every musician to offer up themselves to the altar of creative altercation that is the stage, but ever since I was young enough to remember considering girls were stinky I wanted to be a rock star.
But how? Answering the school careers officer’s career questioning with the firm and unyielding reply that I wished to make my way in the world through the pursuit of loudly performed rock perfection earned me only raised eyebrows and slow sighs that told tales of the considered fruitless feckless nature of such a path. When I was at school there was no pamphlet prescribed for the pursuit of a place in the Pantheon of rock godliness. Sure, if you were a classical (aka real) musician there was a sliver of hope in your aspirations to pay the bills with a life of concerts and creativity, but if you desired to develop as a professional electrical musician the advice of the careers officer was entirely absent. And so after my perennial persistence of being in a band I found myself on what my careers officer considered a comparable compromise; I was enrolled on a nursing course. I was destined to forgo the baying of the hungry crowd for the bedpan of strangers aching bowels.
So you’ll perhaps understand that in finding regular sources absent in their knowledge of how I might climb the ladder of rock I turned to these band biographies. I was in search of tangible titbits of advice that might launch me toward where I wished to be. Time after time my search was in vain; no advice was gifted to me from these pages. There was no three step plan to greatness, there were no hints at how to crack the scene, there was no practical pointers to aid me in my quest.
As I mentioned earlier most books on bands cover the early days as if they were an unfortunate ailment that should not be discussed in polite company. They will briefly mention that after three years of gigging the band was spotted and propelled skyward towards their place in the rock and roll hall of fame. Surely that seems simplistic, even to those of us who don’t indulge in the fruitlessly damaging drug that is dreaming of stardom? Would the biography of a great political leader mention only briefly a day or two of the subject’s youth before leaping forward to the day their achievements were rewarded in the Queen’s new years honours?
The early careers of all those who achieve greatness have a remarkable and definite bearing on making them who they are at the moment they achieve said greatness. For a chap like Winston Churchill it was the grotesque failure of campaigns in his charge (like the bloodbath that was Gallipoli in World War One) that became a jigsaw piece in the complex puzzle that formed the man that helped steer allied victory in World War Two. Should an eager young history degree student gloss over Churchill’s pre-WW2 life in a dissertation then I’m sure he’d achieve something less than worthy of his time in the hallowed halls of academia.
So why when it comes to great bands do we turn our attention away from the years they spend slogging their glorious guts out before they ascend into our collective consciousness? It’s these early years of disappointment and obscurity that crushes and manipulates bands into those beat driven beasts we love. There’s some truth to the fact that often a band’s first album is more impassioned than those that follow it. The first album a band releases could well take two or three years to write, years of rewriting, polishing and perfecting, all done in punishing poverty and the constant belittling nonchalance of the world at large. Should a band be propelled into stratospheric stardom with their first major release their second album will most likely be written without the benefit of self doubt and the fears of failure that fuelled their first fantastic foray. The logic follows that a second album written during drug and champagne fuelled orgies in five star hotels may lack the grit and urgency of its predecessor. And prescribed cliché calls this the difficult second album.
The hard lessons learned before a band breaks through entirely dictate the type of band they will be, it also cements or sullies the relationships between band members that develop during these awkward early years. During their first few years bands develop the awesome siege spirit that protects and envelops them both creatively and practically.
Not all bands make it past awkward obscurity; in fact the vast majority of bands never make it. Succeeding in a band is less likely than succeeding in a lottery, and at least playing the lottery is considerably cheaper and undeniably less hassle than playing in a band. For every million selling band there are a million bands that will never sell. I believe the torrid tales of the terminally tenebrous are no less fascinating and entertaining than those of their breakthrough brethren. Here I will tell you the tale of a band that never made it, a band that never troubled the charts or nibbled the elbow of awesomeness. I will divulge the details of a band that existed for over a decade and utterly consumed the lives of those involved; both the players and the supporting cast. What follows is the tale of Junk Culture – a band that owned my soul for most of my adult young life. A band that I left my job for, a job I faced brutal violence for, a true band of brothers. Junk Culture was a band untroubled by the pressures and expectations of fans (for we had none). We were unhindered by the obstacle of creativity that is the symbiant of success. A band with a cavalier attitude to talent, and only a nodding familiarity with striving for success. You’ll laugh, you’ll pity us, but most of all hopefully you’ll empathise and enjoy this tale, whether you are involved in a band of your own or not. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, a tale of Junk Culture.
