We're just four lost souls, swimming in a fishbowl...

I went to the last Picturehouse gig tonight. Obviously, having been in the band previously, and having departed on unusually good terms, this was not a thing that I necessarily wanted to be a part of, the farewell, I mean - I never wanted it to end. The whole Picturehouse ethos has, and had, always been one of giving the people not necessarily what they thought they needed in terms of light pub rock entertainment, but what they should have. Satisfactorily, the band pulled out an old Charlatans number toward the end of the evening in order to get Mr. Wendell back up on stage, and then followed that with a song which allowed me to overact tremendously in a shape-throwingly hammy performance of a Kings of Leon track. Earlier, bass player Kilbey had pointed out that the only song which had stayed in the set from day one of the band's existence all the way through to the final gig was an obscure REM cover of a song by Wire. As it happened I was called up for an encore, and channelled all I knew about fronting a band, armed only with a mic stand and working elbows, and tried to do justice to Toddler, who was the first singer I ever saw who threw his arms about, smoked a cigarette and performed Suffragette City in a way that made me think that one day I'd like to do the same. Tonight, I hope I did that legacy justice. You know that thing that goes "blah di blah just a band...hmm hmm hmm - just a band..."? Well, Picturehouse were - just a band, but a tiny piece of me died tonight with that group. They - no, we, were just a band, but they were my band, and for some of us, they were the best thing on the planet. They gave me the opportunity to be Jimmy Page; for a while I was Pete Townsend, on a couple of occasions I did Mick Ronson.
You probably won't have seen this band, you didn't clap for the encore, they didn't even once play your wedding, but if they had, oh, if they had...
Odd, this - a eulogy for a little combo that we put together just so that we could go to the pub with our mates. And we did. Boys, oh we did.