Much like the beloved family Christmas tree, we in Picturehouse are dragged out from the back of the garage, looking slightly more tattered than last year, but dressed festively up, and with even a few new baubles to brighten things a bit, and dispatched to The Pickerel for our last show of 2025, shortly to be followed - in two weeks’ time - by our first show of 2026. Look, I don’t look after the diary. We start by comparing Christmasses, ailments and waistlines, and generally agree that we’ve done the best we can under the circumstances. A Picturehouse game of Guess Who would be a remarkably untainted pursuit - “Does your band member wear glasses?” “Yes” [click, click, click, click]. Tempus Fugit*, after all.
The baubles thing is quite a nice way of putting it in that although the band itself is an ongoing concern - and few branches of the tree have been removed, repaired and then replaced along the way - the decorations continue to evolve. I recently found a cassette (a format first introduced in 1963) I’d compiled of suggestions for the set list at an early stage (we still haven’t got round to any of them), however these days someone will be listening to 6Music, or Tidal, or their lovingly-curated** Spotify playlist and be struck by inspiration before WhatsApping (first introduced in 2009) the group chat with a YouTube link and posting the chin in hand emoji.*** This has happened with increasing frequency as we approach the gig, to the point where we have four ‘new’ songs to fit into our evening’s salon, and that’s if you don’t include the festive encore. Depending on your definition of ‘festive’ I think Del Amitri’s ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ fits the mood of the Christmas perineum perfectly and besides, two of us got Justin Currie’s book as presents.
One of these new songs we intend to embark upon for the first time we only ran through a couple of times at the last rehearsal because The Drummer had spent all week practising the tricky drum fill in the breakdown and we didn’t have the heart to put all his hard work to waste. Nevertheless he still had to remind himself of it via his phone before we went on. On the other side of the stage The Keyboard Player was rueing that the sample he’d downloaded of The Killers’ intro wasn’t loud enough to project over the PA. In the meantime, I was wondering whether a Les Paul (first introduced in 1952) at ten pounds**** wasn’t something I should reconsider as a tool in the workplace, what with my back and everything. As The Drummer pointed out, at least The Keyboard Player has one of those new-fangled standing work stations that are so popular in offices these days.
So preoccupied with the new material was I that the older stuff seemed to have seeped out of my brain. Faced with an upcoming solo in one of the three songs we play that was performed at Live Aid, I realised with horror that I had no idea where to start and so the muscle memory that usually carries me through these things was going to have to give way to the angel of What Key Is It In, which is basically St. Jude for guitarists. I think I got away with it, and was extraordinarily surprised to hear myself being complimented on it by The Singer as he introduced the next number. I think we all had the yips to a degree - one particular smooth verbal introduction on my part was completely derailed by the apparent sound of a shed being constructed toward the back of the stage and the ghost of ‘Smile’s past was very much present in the room. Buoyed by a full house however, we soldiered on unbowed, entertained not only by the spontaneous singalongs but by the theatrical back and forth of a group of youngsters who clearly had a pub crawl agenda, but who kept being drawn back as if by magnetism as we started another song which one or more of them beamed in recognition at and pleaded with the party to be able to stay for just one more. I expect they knew them from their parents’ CD collections (first released in 1982).
We tried the new one with the big fill as the first encore and were delighted to have a pub full of people singing back the ‘La, la la la la, la la la la, lalalalalalalala’ hook with which Jim Kerr secured himself a very generous writing credit on the theme song to ‘The Breakfast Club’ (released 1985), the drum part performed in an exemplary fashion - one afternoon’s work for Mel Gaynor, a lifetime of aspiration for The Drummer. In the cool night air we performed the usual gig post-hoc analysis - missed cues, false intros, the set list being printed in too small a font to be read from a standing position, and the overwhelming sense that a room full of people had sung, danced, thrown off their cares and given themselves up to the groove. For all of our gripes about tuning, amp buzz, a lumpy set and the correct pacing of the second set, the Martians could land in the car park, and no-one would care.
* There is no truth in the rumour that The Drummer thought that that was the spell Harry Potter used when he couldn’t locate a metronome in music lessons.
**Algorithm generated.
***Yes, we still use those.
****About four and a half kilos under the decimal system (introduced in 1795).
*****We tend to subscribe to the ‘If that’s what you think it sounds like then that’s what it sounds like’ approach. Some of us can’t listen to the original version of ‘Band on the Run’ for example as we’ve being playing it so long that we have very much made it our own. Same with ‘My Sharona’. Nevertheless, some bits are absolutely hooks which need to be performed as per the record, such as the guitar solo in ‘Just What I Needed’ by The Cars.
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