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B.I.T.I. (Before Is This It)

London

While Pete and Carl were throwing poetry nights there was a bunch of bands bubbling in the London underground with a punk attitude and banging tunes. A scene was forming, it just needed a break, which came once The Libertines had theirs.

There was loads of bands, some lasted a few gigs, a handful lasted a few albums. This is how it went for a few of them.

Special Needs

Special Needs was a band ahead of their time (forming in 1998) and they never got the opportunity to fully live out their potential, their name often drew controversy (they briefly changed it to The Needs) and they fell victim of being on a major label.

Zac Stephenson “I worked at a London Irish newspaper in 1997 and Daniel (Shack) came along to do work experience. We had enough overlap of musical interest to become friends and he was learning guitar, I wanted to sing so first we started just kind of jamming in his bedroom. Then Phil started coming along and bringing his bass.

At this point our main influence was probably the Manic Street Preachers, mainly the Richey period when they were a lot cooler. We all dyed our hair, wore eyeliner, shirts with spray-painted slogans, feather boas, the whole kit and caboodle. Slightly cringe now to look back on that.

We did some sessions in a rehearsal room with a drummer I roped in, auditioned a few more but it looked like it was doomed to fail when Daniel and Phil decided to go to University in Sheffield.

A few months in though, they rang me and told me they had met Andrew, who had an interesting vision about what a band could be like, and asked me if I’d still be interested in trying to get something going. I was, so I’d get the train up to Sheffield every few weekends and we’d do some stuff in a practice room.

We went through drummers faster than you go through underwear but we persevered for the whole time they were at university. Summers in London gave us a bit of progress and then when they returned back to London we focussed on finding the perfect drummer and we did in Neil. He was better than any drummer we’d ever worked with before but he’d still go into a rehearsal room on his own and practice for hours. And he had a brilliant droll Scottish sense of humour. Just fitted in so perfectly. He was the missing piece of the jigsaw so to speak. He was like a sweeper in football. Sort of tidied up everything that was wrong with us musically.

Still, we were finding it hard to get gigs, mainly due to our name, so we started our own weekly club night in a pub in Acton. It was quite a dive but we loved it. And we’d fly around London going to other gigs and nights. The next turning point for us then was when we met Sara and Nadia from the Pyrrha fanzine. They knew everyone. They introduced us to John Kennedy at Xfm, to Razorlight, and possibly most crucially Alan McGee. John Kennedy started championing us and we saw more people coming to our gigs. Then Alan offered us a single deal (on his label, {Poptones), which graduated to an album deal with Mercury and the rest is history I suppose.

We recorded the album in March 2005 with Ian Grimble at 2khz in Willesden Junction. Alan McGee had spoken to a bunch of other producers, including Mick Jones, Bernard Butler and Andrew Loog Oldham. In fact Loog Oldham had apparently wanted to do it but he couldn’t make it work. It’s my favourite anecdote of the time that Alan McGee said that “the singer…” (me) was “…flying on the wings of greatness”. I mean that’s the guy that managed Oasis at the height of their powers, so it’s hard to imagine better.

Anyway, Ian had worked with the Manics, Travis, Texas, so he had a good CV. He was a bit of a taskmaster. We did a week in preproduction where he helped us sculpt or prune some of the songs. I remember near the end of that process Alan came into the studio to hear how the songs were sounding. After we finished each song he said the same thing: “It’s a hit”.

Ian made us do countless takes. Real perfectionist. Massively underrated producer. For one of the songs he set up the drum kit in the bathroom because he thought the tiles in there would give the acoustics he thought would work better for that song. He was right.

I think the funniest incident in those recording sessions from my perspective was walking in to the kitchen and seeing the American artist Grace Jones looking in a state of distress. I asked her if she was OK and she walked up to me about six inches from my face and said, “I’m looking for honey.” So I helped Grace Jones scour the studios kitchen for a jar of honey. Unsuccessfully, I might add.”

In the autumn of 2005 Mercury cancelled the bands' record contract as new management at the label cleared a lot of Poptones roster. The band negotiated a deal to keep the rights for the album but they didn’t have a label to put it out, the situation was frustrating for the band, audiences at gigs were getting smaller, they were skint, Zac moved back to Ireland and they broke up.

The band were approached by ReAction Records who wanted to put out the album which was finally released in August 2006, receiving positive reviews but the band had moved on, there wasn’t the temptation to reform.

After a 5-year break, the band had stayed in touch via Facebook and they decided to get back together, initially just for one gig at Proud in Camden, however, it sold out and they loved it so much that they said yes to every other gig they got offered, including gigs in New York and Norway.

Zac Stephenson “Well, Glastonbury was one highlight. From that day onwards you’re always able to say you played Glastonbury which I think is a major ambition for pretty much every band starting out. Playing Hyde Park was great. New Year’s Eve we packed out the Kentish Town Forum. Touring was often fun. Could be tiring and tedious at times but when we got on stage it was (usually) brilliant.

I used to love the radio sessions, Xfm, BBC, Virgin. And seeing your CD on the shelves in HMV was a kind of bucket list thing too.

But I guess overall it was just seeing people packed together in venues singing the songs back to you. Our reunion gig at Proud Camden was beyond belief. 600+ people crammed in on a Tuesday night in February. We hadn’t played live for 5 years so the anticipation was palpable. Electric atmosphere.”

The Crimea

The Crimea became one of John Peel’s favourite bands but their story begins a few years earlier, with the heavier and intense band, The Crocketts, a story that shows the destruction the music industry can have on people.

Despite the negatives, The Crimea became trailblazers as they released their second album, Secrets of the Witching Hour for free online in 2007 which saw them featured in the news around the world while supporting huge bands such as Kings of Leon and Coldplay. Sadly, the years of mental health and addiction took its toll on frontman Davey, just as the band were reaching the goal they had been striving for.

Davey Macmanus “The Crocketts started in 1995, we were so young, 18, when we got signed to V2. When we did our first photoshoot, it was with Mario Testino and it cost a lot of money, our manager said I looked a bit tubby so I developed an eating disorder which I had for the next 20 years, I thought food was poison. Our first tour was with The Pogues, I worshipped Shane Magowan, we were introduced to hard drugs, we were doomed from the start, somehow we were grouped into the whole indie scene, maybe because we formed in Aberystwyth and were part of the Welsh scene, touring with Stereophonics a lot, Space, Catatonia, Super Furries, 60ft Dolls. I became an alcoholic and drug addict. Every concert I was on ecstasy. I started hurting myself onstage, This became a thing, as our songs were about being bullied, self-harm and eating disorders, we attracted a crazy fanbase who came to all our concerts and showed me their scars.

Although the band was doing very well in terms of selling out bigger and bigger shows and getting 5 out of 5 in the music papers, commercially we didn't sell enough records and V2 brought us into their office one day, there was a new head of A&R, Malcolm Dunbar, he played us three songs, Stereophonics’ Have a Nice day, Feeder’s Buck Rogers and Blink 182’s famous song, Then he told us he wanted our third album to sound like that. It didn’t, our music was getting heavier and heavier and our actions more destructive, we were dropped.

Suddenly we had to get jobs, me and Dan, the guitarist were working the nightshift in Sainsburys in Romford. Instead of taking cocaine we were taking speed, instead of drinking Jack we were drinking yellow pack, we were all living in the same house, and eventually, I woke up one morning and Rich the bass player was gone, then Dan the guitar player locked himself in his bedroom and didn't come out for several weeks, then suddenly he was gone. There was only me and Owen the drummer left, we decided to completely reinvent ourselves, change our style and sound and play beautiful music. Instead of our audience smashing the venues they would sit down like at the cinema.

We were so lucky, we rapidly built up a following, suddenly instead of being in Kerrang we were in The Guardian, we were being lauded as cool which was amazing that we had turned that tide around and people were respecting our change of direction. We weren’t part of any scene until later on by accident because we played with lots of big bands that liked our music.

I met John Peel outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. I was working for the council, sweeping the streets, it was autumn and the leaves kept falling from the trees, it was a fucking nightmare, I was dressed in the street cleaner uniform and I had one of those dustcarts you push, I recognised John Peel going into the Embassy and I went up to him and gave him a demo CD, that night he played all 7 songs from the CD on his show. He said on air that he went back and listened to The Crocketts but he didn't like them, but he loved The Crimea. Before he died he said about Lottery Winners on Acid ‘I could listen to that forever and ever”. He helped us so much and played us so much but after that first meeting I never met him again.

We were just incredibly lucky again, while at South by South West we were seen by Perry Watts Russell a famous A&R guy for Warner Bros. We were actually offered a few different deals and we went with him because he had signed Radiohead, Damian Rice and Arcade Fire and all these other people. Plus we wanted to go and live in America.

For our debut album we went to Mississippi to record with this famous producer, He had just produced Modest Mouse (who we toured with later) Cop Car single so he was the hot guy at the time. We were there for months and months but we were just getting high and not getting much done, while the producer was changing all our songs in ways we didn't like. He wore a white coat because he was meant to be a scientific genius. I didn't get on with him, I liked him a lot and we were friends but we had different musical ideas, we wasted hundreds and thousands of dollars with this dude, so we went to New York for another long period of time and re-recorded the album with another producer in James Iha’s studio.

I kinda knew we were going to be dropped as our singles from the album had been on the decline, no.20 something, then no.47, then no.60 in the charts, Radio 1 had yet again (for the second band in a row) refused to playlist us, we had the A list on Xfm but that didn’t matter, we had amazing press but that didn’t matter.

So when we were dropped by Warner Bros. we still had a really good publishing deal with WEA so that kept us going and we recorded an album ourselves, we had an old house near Norwich in the country and we rehearsed there for weeks on end and recorded, the band were amazing, Joe, Andy and Owen and the guitar player we had at the time Andy, and we all stuck together and worked hard. We went to Latvia to mix the record with Greg Haver, we loved the album, because we made it ourselves and it was dear to us.

It wasn’t our idea to release it for free, it was our manager Tav. It was an incredible idea. We played on top of Primrose Hill at midnight on the day of release and the album was released at the same time, there were hundreds of people there, the next day we went to China on tour and we were on the front cover of newspapers all over the world, it was truly mindblowing, all the news channels were interviewing us and all these papers and we’re in China so it looked really cool.

Q Magazine said it was one of the top 5 moments that changed music, we did get some credit for it, maybe not enough, but we got some adverts out of it and could still sell out our shows everywhere so we got to continue

At first we had to pay to tour with other bands like The Pogues, The Levellers and Stereophonics, then we became friends with the Stereophonics and we never had to pay them to tour again, I enjoyed touring with Billy Corgan, Kings of Leon, Travis, Modest Mouse, Snow Patrol, Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol actually financed our third album, Square Moon, he also financed my volunteering in Africa as a nurse.

I had a lot of problems with my mental health, with the eating disorder, with self-harm, with drug addiction, then with a heroin addiction, When it came time to release Square Moon I was so frazzled I couldn’t tour or do interviews so I just had to stop the band and leave when we had just made our greatest record and finally achieved what we had been trying to achieve for 20 years.

I didn’t get any support from any labels, in fact they encouraged me to be wild, I had a lot of support from my bandmates and my family but they couldn’t help me. I just felt this pressure all the time as the songwriter to come up with hit songs, so I was obsessed with writing and trying to write hits the whole time, that's why we only really developed our sound when we were dropped and it gave me the freedom to not have to worry about writing hits and inadvertently wrote our best music

Releasing Square Moon on double vinyl and the reviews it got are things I look back on fondly, then becoming a nurse and going to Africa, the highlight of my career was playing round a campfire in the middle of a desert to a bunch of orphans with HIV, you have to really sing from your heart when you don’t have a microphone.”

Neils Children

Neils Children are one of the bands who were overlooked during the 2000’s but their DIY ideals and approach to consistently evolve is the reason that they have continued to make music, well, the 2 founding members, frontman John and drummer Brandon, they’ve got through a handful of bassists over their years.

Scenes aren’t built to last but Neils Children have never been part of the scene which has allowed them to be different to the trends or a short-lived fad.

Firstly, they formed in 1999, before The Strokes arrived, by the time the 2000’s bands were starting out Neils Children had already been together a couple of years. They came from Harlow, on the outskirts of London, they were inspired by the ‘60’s and they sounded different varying between post-punk, freakbeat pop and psychedelia. They looked different too, decked out in black with makeup, big hair, fur coats, skinny jeans and pointy shoes, they had to time their journeys into London to avoid trouble with football fans. They were doing this years before their mates, The Horrors, who they influenced.

Everything about the band was intense and their live shows were always exciting. The band was fearless and did everything themselves.

The pair were studying music together and immediately bonded over bands, within a couple of months, they were in the rehearsal rooms in college. John already knew how to play guitar, Brandon had to learn the drums and their classmate Tom was on bass.

Aged 16 and looking for music that excited them was hard in 1999, until they discovered ‘60’s pop which then led them to the underground psychedelic scene.

It wasn’t just the music but the clothes, the style and the community which was lively in Mousetrap, a ‘60’s psychedelic club night in Finsbury Park. They were the young outsiders but they quickly fitted in.

They rehearsed a lot and started playing regularly, word got around that they were an exciting young band, described as freak-beat ‘60’s and even though that was what they were listening to, ‘80’s influences organically crept in too giving them a punk edge with The Jam and Buzzcocks. In the summer of 2000 they met Rhys, who would go on to form The Horrors years later and they struck up a great friendship and became the house band at his club, Junk, in Southend.

Their influences would grow even further when they discovered the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Rapture who were starting to make their way over to the UK. This then took them on to listening to Public Image Ltd and Gang Of Four, their sound evolved into something more raw with a nod to post-punk and a contemporary twist.

John’s grandad managed the band, he helped them out financially and drove them around. He had no interest in music but loved being part of the gang. He joined them on a tour of Spain before the band had released anything, organised by friends from the psychedelic scene. They drove for three days to Barcelona and made their way around the country for 10 gigs with a settee in the back of a van and a map to get around. It was DIY at its best and they loved it.

Soft City Recordings signed them up in 2003 to release their ‘first album’, the band don’t really like it to be looked on as their first album as it was a few singles and a bunch of songs they quickly recorded. These days it would probably be called a ‘mixtape’ today, the label was keen to get it out as a stepping stone for the band to get signed to a major label. They practiced a lot, they were super tight and ended up recording 4 or 5 songs a day, all live.

Once the band started seeing others investing in them they upped their game, stripped everything back to give fans the best possible show, developing their songs and ‘think’ about what they were doing instead of just doing it. Although they toured a lot in the UK, it was Europe where they found more success.

John’s grandad took a backseat from management as the band signed to a new label and got a management team in place. In 6 weeks they recorded what was meant to be their debut album in a studio on Old Street, London, they supported The Horrors on a UK 2-week tour then went on a headline tour for 2 weeks.

The relationship with both the label and management team quickly went sour. They had been used to their DIY approach and got things done themselves, they found that things got slowed down when working with others. A single should have been ready to sell on The Horrors support tour but it was delayed and they weren’t happy with how the mix of the recordings for the album sounded so they got out of the contract, lost the songs and started again.

After going on hiatus the band returned with a new psychedelic sound and went to France to record an album.

John and Brandon were super close, John’s grandad was part of it too and each bassist they had played a key role in the journey, making the band feel more like a family.

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According to her linkedin Sylvie has been working as a digital marketing manager for AG Artists since June 2019. Before that she was a administrative assistant. What a ‘coincidence’ it’s the same months the clown show started. Before that we also never got cringey tweets and posts, or other fuck up like posting wrong dates or posting when he still on stage.

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Support Our #creatives® Meets Jermaine Smith ( @EverydayDaBrand ), #creator of "The Needs" Film

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