Beautiful Pea Green Boat only played six gigs. Their first, on the 1st of October 1986 at the legendary Coasters nightclub in Edinburgh's Tollcross, was an evening to raise funds for a leukaemia charity, as their original guitarist, Lewis Edwards, had died, suddenly and tragically of this illness the year before.
Many people, including some of the city's top bands, generously supported the event, and it was filmed for a video to raise additional cash for the charity.
Beautiful Pea Green Boat were on first, so soundchecked last. In between soundcheck and show, their backing tape machine was moved and all the outputs swapped around randomly, and wrongly. The sound was terrible, the band, Heather Wright and Ian Williams, stopped as soon as they started, as they couldn't hear what was going on. A sound guy tried to sort it out, but in the end they tried to do what they could and eventually managed to finish the set. This made it onto the video...
A few months later, on the 25th of June 1987, Beautiful Pea Green Boat played a show in Tours, France, at a club called La Fauvette. We recorded it from the mixing desk, put it in a box and forgot all about it until 2018, when it was rediscovered and added to the band's Bandcamp site (address above).
Around the same time, Scottish filmmaker Grant McPhee got in touch looking for information about the lineup for the Coasters show and the video maker. Fast forward a couple of years and he kindly sent us through a digitised version of our performance from the VHS tape.
But the sound was awful. Really, really bad. So, what we've done is to re-edit the video footage to the audio from the show we recorded in France. It's a slightly different arrangement, and Heather sings it slightly differently, so it looks a bit like a dubbed spaghetti western, but it's all we have - one video clip and one recording, so why not?
Finally, it's quite a long song, so only half of it is on the video - we've included some memorabilia to take us to the end of the song, including an amusingly accurate review of the gig in the Record Mirror.
If you were at the show, this is what it should have sounded like!
