That time our car broke down and created a giant traffic jam.
My granny said there had been a "6 mile tailback" on the news and I just randomly decided our Audi 80 had caused it. It might have done, I remember looking back out the window and seeing cars stopping up and down the hills behind us. No mobiles back then, so my dad had to walk back to a Little Chef and call the AA. We finally got it shoved out of the way and cars were passing for ages while I sat watching. I also vaguely remember stopping in some suburb for a mechanic to get under the engine compartment and have all the oily bits out. I'm surprised we even made it to the holiday.
That bar that chucked out an old granny for wearing a hat, because she might be a chav
My brother worked there, he quit about a month before it happened. It sounded like the bar was really badly run, with nepotistic "hires" who just slept in the back room while people the boss wasn't friends with worked twice as hard.
Fish Aid
My brother owned a guitar for 5 minutes and was suddenly in this band. Never mind if he'd learned to play it or not. Apparently they sent something to John Peel and he said he liked the name. No comment on the, er, music, I notice.
Cruel to be Kind
A two-piece band my brother was in with some nutter. They made a genre of music called "Pisscore", which basically consisted of pummeling a cheap drum machine and randomly twanging a guitar while screaming incoherent swear words and occasionally quoting the TV Go Home book. Song titles included Moody Bitch, A Bag of Smashed Twats, Diluted is a Cunt (the only one with actual lyrics, based on some bloke they were arguing with on a forum), Scrambled is a Cunt (also about somebody they were arguing with on a forum, later they became friends with him) and a bunch of others. They made three, er, "albums" over about 6 months in the middle of 2003. The second was tastefully titled The Second Shitdicking. The first two albums back-to-back fit comfortably on one side of a casette. There were also a few (well, two) copies on Minidiscs. I doubt any copies exist any more. The tape was probably left in my old car for years and then went to the scrapyard with it.
That car. Not pictured: the green water the other headlight was half-filled with.
They also did some comedy sketches, the nutter was a pretty good impressionist, actually. One sketch took the piss out of John Peel.
Oh, also, one of their songs got a public playing at The Junction in Cambridge just before Raging Speedhorn took the stage. Most of the audience probably had no idea what the fuck they were listening to.
Shittleport Anti Paenises
My brother's nutter friend was in this two-piece band with somebody else, but I think my brother did some guitar, er, "work" for them too. Otherwise pretty indistinguishable from Cruel to be Kind. Songs included McTeen Mother, Dweeeeb and one about how some pub in Littleport charges too much for a pint and is full of old codgers.
Apparently they met a bloke on a train once who had heard of the band without already being friends with / related to the members.
All that remains of the nutter's website. I did some digital arcaeology for this section. My brother's website is archived in full, but he's trying to break into stand-up; in the UK in 2024... and you just know that crowd would delight in destroying somebody over an offhand thing they wrote 21 years ago, so I'm keeping it secret.
The Mudshark Interview
Another band my brother was in, this time with three members! They played the "Future Stage" at Strawberry Fair, Cambridge, in May 2006. They also opened for Zeroscape! (see below)
Fat Wallet
A two-piece band my brother was in (are we seeing a pattern, here?). They were briefly famous around Lincoln University in 2007 - 8, with songs like Dahn't Stop me Naah, Dahhn't Wonna Miss A Fing and Shakira's A Right Slag (AKA The Hiphop Medley). Then they had a dose of the old creative differences, and never talked to each other again. I liberated a few of the songs from Myspace, but have lost some in ensuing moves of computer.
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The British IBM
A band my brother is in which has more than two members, makes actual music, and plays actual gigs, imagine that. They had their own beer at one point, too. They did a few gigs at the Museum of Computing History in Cambridge, and also had a pixel art animated music video which made my brother look really old, even though he was only about 25. Their music got used in a documentary film called From Bedrooms to Billions, and has also appeared in a handful of TV shows.
Saint Zoe
A pretty bloody good band in Cambridge around 2006. Until they broke up. I made friends with a woman who made friends with the bass player after being run over by her. Like ya do. Anyway the singer was hot (and also named Mike). Also one of their songs was called Clowning Around, which inspired the name of that comic (which was originally going to be a Saint Zoe fanzine). Later on my mum worked with another member of the band (after they broke up).
Hey, want to actually hear them?
Will be removed upon request
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The bass player, Claudia, was also in a folk band called Working Title. They played Strawberry Fair and the Cambridge Beer Festival a few times.
Zeroscape
An awesome Canadian Reggae-Metal band who toured Europe in 2005 and 2006. On the first tour they bought this piece-of-shit van sight unseen off Ebay, of course it barely worked. They got some graffiti artists in Sweden or Denmark to do an awesome piece on it, but they kept getting pulled over so repainted it white with Dulux and rollers.
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Anyway my brother and I, along with some of his friends, ended up hanging out with the guys. We also saw them in London with about 10 emo bands opening who were all the same. When Zeroscape came on the whole audience was moshing. To be fair at that point "the whole audience" was 5 people. I was also absurdly pissed. We had to hang about outside King's Cross all night to wait for the first train. It was just after 7/7 so there was cops everywhere and we didn't get mugged, so that turned out alright.
Anyway, in the knowledge that they were going to be back in 2006, I planned to have issue 1 of the original SCV, then more of a fanzine with comics, ready a month before they were due to play Man on the Moon (RIP) on May 5th 2006, and advertise the gig on the back cover. That fell flat, and morphed into the Zeroscape gig being SCV's "launch party" and, erm, in 2023 SCV is still going to come about somewhen or other.
They also played in Bury St Edmonds, we were shoved in a tiny back room that didn't even have a proper stage, just a kind of roped-off corner. Still got an awesome pit going among the audience, which mostly consisted of members of the support. I beleive it was also in Bury in 2006 where they did manage to draw a real audience, in a tiny room. But the bar owner's friends wanted to play so they only did 3-4 songs. My brother filmed this on a Mini-DV camcorder, then taped over some of the best bits on the way home, filming the lights of passing cars. Which wasn't clever.
Between Two Worlds
A 9-minute zombie film my brother wrote and directed. I was two zombies in it. He rented some proper gear for filming it, like a boom mic (visible reflected in some windows in one scene) and a 1080p digital video camera (which was amazing at the time). He also got some acting students to act in it, they got the giggles a lot when rehearsing the dialogue. I filmed some "making of" videos that I ought to put up here.
Christmas is a time... to get really FUCKED!!!!
A series of CDs put out in the 2000's, featuring local Cambridgeshire bands. It would be launched with an epic party at Man on the Moon. My brother was involved, to a greater or lesser degree, with the series from 2 or 3 up to about 6. Another band he was in before The British IBM played one or two of the launch parties. He also got extremely drunk and was air-guitaring on the (very small) stage during other band's sets too. It may also have been at one of these where somebody's ridiculous number of guitar pedals tripped the electric. I don't remember due to having been really FUCKED!!!! at the time.