In the past couple of weeks, I've been to a couple of gigs that made me cast my mind back to the earliest days of The False Dots. The first of these gigs was the bands 46th Birthday party bash at the Dublin Castle and the second was the Band Up 1st birthday bash, at the Mean Fiddler. At the Dots Birthday bash, we played a song called Wrong! which was one of the first songs we wrote, before we even had a band. It was the first song we ever played at our first ever rehearsal. We had never played it live before. It was one of many songs we junked as we improved to the point that we felt we were ready to gig. I co wrote it with Pete Conway. With most songs, one of us would write the man body of lyrics and the other would tear it apart and then we'd go through line by line until we were happy. Wrong was different. We decided that before we started the band, we should write a band manifesto. The idea was rather pompous. We'd have a manifesto and anyone who joined the band or followed us would have to sign up to it. It was inspired by the political stance of the early Clash music and later by Anarcho pop band Crass.
And what what about the other event? Band Up is an alliance of Independent bands. Members of around 100 bands attended. I went with our drummer Graham Ramsey and our combined age seemed greater than everyone else put together. We are in our 60's, they were all young and upcoming musicians full of hope. We chatted to quite a few of the bands. I was really struck by the way bands have changed since Pete and I first got the Dots together. For us, it was more about being a band thabn music. It seems almost inexplicable to todays younger musicians. We wrote our manifesto, chose a band name and designed a logo before we learned to play or had any songs. We were absolute rubbish musicians, but brimming with an absolute conviction that, with our punk rock ethos, we were right about everything and all of the 'boring old fart' bands who had shaped the music industry were going to be blown away in a tidal wave of punk energy. We were sixteen years old and we were deeply suspicious of anyone over 26 and dismissive of any bands from the hippy and rock and roll era. The only bands we listened to, who preceded 1976 were The Velvet Underground, MC5, T Rex, Bowie and anything Reggae or Ska (who we gave a free pass to). Had Band Up been formed in 1978 rather than 2024, I doubt Graham and I would have been welcome. I jumped up and jammed with a few other younger musicians. I doubt any of us would have been seen dead on stage with such old farts as we are now, when we started. Of course, within a couple of years, as we learned to play, widened our tastes and realised what it took to be in a band, such foolish adolescent snobbery had passed. When Hank Marvin's son Paul joined the band, I was thrilled Hank jammed with us in the studio and offered tips on guitar playing, even gifting me the opening riff of Not all She Seems. He seemed incredibly ancient in 1978 when Paul was in the band. Hank was 37 at the time! Pete was more hardline than me about punk ideals. He was less than thrilled that Hank jammed with us and was actually quite rude to him. As we were in Hanks private studio, I was upset with his boorish attitude. I believe that if you are being given hospitality, then you should be gracious. Pete thought Hank was part of a corrupt music establishment, that needed to be torn down.
I would imagine that if Hank Marvin turned up for a jam at Band Up, there would be universal delight. Todays generation of musicians are far more open and receptive than us '77 punks. It got me thinking about the punk era. Pete Conway was totally committed at the time to hardcore punk values. To him, music and the band was just a vehicle for social change. It was all about giving us a platform to challenge the establishment. I've not met a musician for decades who has said such a thing. But for the False Dots, it was absolutely central to what we were doing in 1979. For Pete, sorting the manifesto out was far more important than anything else. We started planning the band in late 1977 and probably spent the best part of a year arguing about the manifesto, the name, the image, the trousers we'd wear, how low we'd wear our guitar straps and what our logo would look like. We had no instruments and no songs, but we had a clear idea of what trousers we'd wear!
And the manifesto. Sadly, I don't have a copy of it. But I did have a 'brilliant' idea back then. We'd set it to music. It would be the first song we played at every gig we did. We'd tell the audience that if they didn't agree they could F**k off! We naively imagined that thousands of people we didn't know would turn up for our first gig and we could pick and chose who stayed and who we asked to leave! I've learned that gigs don't work like that. We, rather pretentiously, decided that our first gig would be our 'Manifesto launch' before we even had instruments! Like so many ideas kids have, before they discover the harsh realities of life, it soon fell away. The clunky, worthy words of the manifesto sounded ridiculous set to music.
But it was so important to us that we we persisted, long after any sensible band would have given up. We decided that we'd change the manifesto into something that resembled a song. I believe, and I may be wrong about this, that Pete excitedly told Steve Ignorant of Crass ( a band that Pete avidly followed for a few months) about his idea and Steve Ignorant shot him down, saying "If you have a manifesto, you are just like all the other politicians. (This is my recollection of what Pete said over a bottle of cider in my shed as we were writing songs. He was prone to embellishing stories, but I have no reason to not believe this happened) "What do you want to be? Prime Minister? Anarchists believe everyone should make their own minds up". Pete turned up for our next songwriting session a bit deflated. This was our big idea and Pete's hero had blown it out of the water. Pete was very deflated. We had a chat about it. The "Falsedots manifesto" morphed into a musical anarchist rant called "Wrong".
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| The Dots original line up |
The opening lyrics "Do you consider yourself a thinking person, or an object for others to manipulate, nobody's immortal, nobody's irreplacable" were the opening lines of the manifesto. We set them over a repeating C/// A/// F/// D/// pattern. It may no longer be a manifesto, but it was our statement of what we were. It was the first song we played at our first rehearsal. By the time we actually had a properly functional band together properly, we'd moved on. Pete and I had largely stopped going to gigs together, as our tastes had diverged. The band pictured right was our line up from February to September, which was the only line up to play Wrong! My sister took this on a Kodak Instamatic camera in our back garden. The black guitar slung around my neck was actually her Kimbara Les Paul copy, that played like a cheese grater and wouldn't stay in tune!
By 1980, Pete had replaced Crass with The Birthday Party as his favourite band. We weren't spending five nights a week writing songs and working out ideas in my shed. I was getting more and more into other genres and influences. In January 1980, following a three month break, we slung all of the old songs out, including Wrong.
The songs we wrote between January and June 1980 were some of the best Dots songs of any incarnation. We realised that it was better to have a set way of writing. One of us would write it, the other would critique it, we'd then present it to the band. If it didn't sound good immediately we'd not persevere. It had probably taken us six months to develop the idea for Wrong, only for us to abandon it as soon as we could play a bit better. We learned that you have to be ruthless in how you approach songs. You can't be wedded to songs that don't work. There is a certain irony that a song that was so wrong headed was called Wrong! You'll see from the 1979 setlist (left) that we'd developed by the middle of the year, that the band wasn't a barrel of laughs at that stage.
When we were recently planning our 46th anniversary, I couldn't get out of my head the memory of those early days. I came up with the idea of giving Wrong a debut play, 47 years after we first wrote it. I asked our trumpeter Tom Hammond to sing it, in whatever way he wanted. This was a nod to Steve Ignorants advice, "everyone should think for themselves". When we rehearsed it, I was shocked. I thought it sounded great. It sort of sounded like Blur on amphetamine sulphate. Tom is a generation or two younger than Graham and I. He brings a fresh feel to a lot of the songs. It has emboldened us as a band musically, which is a great thing, but also it has given me a lot of pause for thought on many things, not least how you can transform a piece of music by being open minded. Our early Dots line up was hamstrung by a rigid orthodox musicality, that was totally at odds with the Anarchist ideals that we were supposedly singing about.
The other thing I got thinking about was the idea of a Manifesto for The False Dots. Sadly I've learned that you are lucky to have an audience, so telling people to F@@k Off if they don't like your manifesto is the height of stupidity. In fact, the opposite should be true. You should make everyone feel welcome. So 47 years after we spent six months writing a manifesto, here is the resurrected False Dots manifesto! It is rather different to the 1978/9 version which seemed to be a hundred pages long at it's peak.
1. Our primary goal as a band is to make the people who listen to our music happy.
2. The band will commit to work as hard as humanly possible to give you a good night out if you come to one of our gigs.
3. The band will always be there for a chat before/after we play and we will try and make time to have a chat if you want. Of course when we are breaking down gear etc after we play, give us ten minutes, if we are clearing up.
4. Everyone is welcome at a False Dots gig, on condition they want to have fun and not bother other people.
5. We will do everything in our power, as a band, to support other musicians, bands, artists and creative people. If you follow us on social media, we will endeavour to follow you, if you come and see us, we will try and get down to see you, if you plug us, we will plug you as best we can.
6. The world can seem a harsh and scary place. We believe that music is a force for universal good and whilst we can still breath, still play and people still want to see us, we will do our best to make it just a bit better. We can't change lives, make anyone rich, solve housiong problems etc, but maybe, just maybe, we can put a smile on your face and that is a start.
And finally. here's a little video I spliced together with the desk mix and some pics/clips from mates of the debut performance of Wrong. I wonder, has there ever been a song that has waited 47 years for it's debut live before?
