“I was slightly amazed to find you could get away with that.”

In which Stuart David writes about the beginnings of his first band with Stuart Murdoch, Lisa Helps the Blind.

Alistair’s solution to the difficulties we’d faced with our first two Lisa Helps the Blind gigs was to make sure we had complete control of the environment our third one took place in. We’d got to the point where we sounded pretty good in rehearsal, but we didn’t seem able to take that sound out into the world. So Alistair’s plan was to bring the world, or as much of it as would fit, into rehearsals. He’d decided to set up a gig in his front room, for a small invited audience, and it seemed like it might work. We rehearsed a set of eight songs, including ‘Lord Anthony’, ‘Perfection As a Hipster’, ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’, and on the evening of the gig Alistair begged and borrowed twenty chairs and arranged them all in rows facing the bay window, with a little aisle down the middle.

Stuart invited two or three people. I didn’t invite anyone. And Alistair invited the rest of the audience, which probably amounted to about twenty-five people. When they started to arrive I began to get nervous about how things would go. They were a bewildering assortment of hard rock and S&M fans, for the most part, and when I looked at the programme Stuart had placed on each seat, like the hymn sheets laid out on the pews before a church service, I didn’t think this could go well. The front of the programme featured cartoons of hipsters drawn by Stuart, and inside there was a list of the songs we would play, along with a description of each one, and a manifesto explaining what we were about. I didn’t think it had much in common with what these people were about.

We’d set up in the bay window, and gradually the audience took their seats. It was like looking out at a private memorial service for a heavy-metal god, mostly a blur of black leather and hair. And then Stuart asked everyone to stop talking, which took them a bit by surprise, and after a quick tune-up we started to play our delicate songs, about schoolkids and disenchanted ponies. I thought they might just get us killed. There was a scene in The A-Team during the Eighties, where Boy George and Culture Club had to perform ‘Karma Chameleon’ for a barroom full of rednecks. Their chances of making it through the song and getting out of the bar alive didn’t look good at the outset, but as George sang, the crowd suddenly started to get into it. They had a...