was in Freudian Slip from approx 78-79/80. We used to play mostly at The Conti ?? Is that poss? Sackville Street? I might be getting mixed up. I do remember playing on same bill as The Manchester Mekon at some all dayer at The Squat.
We used to hang out with Bathroom Renovations (Armitage Shanks, John Bidet et al)who had featured our bassist Dale Hibbert when they were just Bathroom & for a very short time I also sang backing vocals for them.
Cheers, Fran
That's it - Cyprus Tavern! The Continental was where we went afterwards for a late one, I think.
Grow Up
Grow Up. In 1976 John Bisset was at Rochdale Art College and making music with the Manchester Musicians Collective, whose core included Tony Friel (bass with the Fall, cello with the collective), Trevor Wishart (electro-acoustic composer and extraordinary vocal improviser), Simon Holt (fashion student and serialist composer) and Dick Witts (percussionist). The Collective was a fertile brew of different energies, and put on gigs at the Band on the Wall. Bisset's first ever public appearance was at one of these eclectic nights. He performed under the name 'Pride' (due to the fact that the headline act was the Fall) and played composed/improvised pieces for piano and kettle, and for cymbals, tent poles, paint tins, treble viol and 12 string guitar. The inclusion of the tent poles in the list of instruments for this gig had got it on the front page of the Manchester Evening News, and local current affairs programme Look North contacted Bisset for him to play on their
Around this time Bisset was given an audition for the band Spherical Objects, a new band being put together by Steve Solamar, a dj from the Electric Circus. Solamar took him on as lead guitarist mainly on the grounds that he couldn't play a conventional guitar solo even if he tried. In fact he turned up for the audition with an acoustic 12 string.
When Bisset started writing his own songs Solamar didn't want to incorporate them into the Objects' set, so Bisset got together with saxophonist Richard Westwood. They performed as a duo for a while, with Richard playing toy accordion and bits of percussion besides the sax. Soon Richard's younger brother joined in on trombone, and then the drummer Billy MacDonald. After a bad experience with a bass player who famously strolled into a gig during the closing song of a set, Bisset took to bass and Roger Blackburn came in as guitarist.
Steve Solamar's attitude to Grow Up was amazingly benevolent. He basically put them in swanky 24 track studios for an ep, two albums, a single and the two tracks for the compliation A Manchester Collection from which the track 'Night Rally' comes, without any conditions other than time. There was no question of the group contributing to the cost of anything - several members were still at school and certainly none had a job. He would sit in the control room, gently overseeing things, making comments to the sound engineer such as 'if John's rustling his lyric sheets you can be sure it's part of the performance', or patiently reminding John of the passage of time as he struggled to record vocals whilst leaning into a grand piano with Richard holding down the loud pedal.
'Night Rally' was written in 1978, when Elvis Costello's 'Armed Forces' came out. It has a track with the same name, and the Grow Up song is about a dark sexual experience during which the Elvis Costello song played repeatedly in the protagonist's head. Grow Up were invited onto a radio show on Manchester Picadilly Radio. The dj played the track, and Bisset was asked what the lyric was all about. The response, "I'm not going to tell you" followed by some crackling dead air, and a rapid termination of the interview incensed the band who were all very excited, sitting around with their headphones on, waiting for their big moment.
The biggest focus of the band was finding cheese sandwiches. They were always hungry, and no-one ever had any money.
The Grow Up of the second album (flying fish) Without Wings is a different beast altogether, as a group. Bisset had left home and was at Art College in London, and the bass and drums which formed the rest of the band were fellow students. The songs from this album contain much more of the sexual ambiguity that was an undercurrent to the Object Music stable. But perhaps that can wait for another sleeve note...
