Post #10 — Thanks for the insult

The single best thing that happened to The Foxes in the spring of 2007 wasn’t headlining Death Disco. It wasn’t being offered America. It wasn’t being offered China. It wasn’t being in NME.

It was being told, in plain English, by a man we’d never met before, that we looked and sounded all wrong.

The Draytones gig had been a saga. Adam Ryan at the Barfly had originally booked us, then pulled the slot to make room for an American touring band, then — somewhere between the diary entry of 6 February (”the gig is off”) and the middle of the month — quietly put us back on.

The Draytones were on 1965 Records — Noel Gallagher1’s label — and we’d put almost no effort into promoting our half of the night, because we’d assumed their fans would do the work. They would, in fact, become quite well known later that year, but at this point we were main support and the room was decent rather than full. Our friend Ash drove down from somewhere. A few regulars came. The diary, written a couple of weeks later, is gentle about it:

We played The Barfly supporting The Draytones – it went ok, but wasn’t as busy as the Yeti gig (we didn’t do much to promote this one as it was a big-ish support slot), so the atmosphere wasn’t quite the same.

And then — the diary entry continues, and this is where the post really starts:

Jo Wisaki (or whatever) came to see us (one of Chris Welch’s friends) who blatantly didn’t really like us (other than thinking we were ‘tight’) and went through a long list of things we could improve on, mainly saying we should listen to The Beatles red compilation album about song structure (!) and get our image sorted.

We were absolutely incensed. Where was the glowing praise and sycophancy which we’d had from everyone up to now?!

He was, however, a friend of Chris Welch’s — the legendary Melody Maker writer who, the previous September, had given us our first proper write-up. Chris’s network was thick with industry-adjacent veterans: men who had been in and around the music business long enough to have opinions about absolutely everything, and absolutely no obligation to be nice about them. Jo ran both a music management company and a design company, and had come down to the Barfly as a favour to Chris.

He stayed afterwards. He gave us the verdict.

“Tight” — a real compliment (or a real stretch?) from a man who otherwise had nothing nice to say.

The Beatles’ Red Album. 1962–1966. Jo’s diagnosis was that our song structures were wrong, and what we needed was a masterclass in pop construction. Go away, study the Red Album, come back when you understand how a song is supposed to be built.

Image. And then, devastatingly: get our image sorted.

This, in particular, landed hard. Because Jo was right.

The Foxes had been going ten months. We’d played twenty-five gigs. We’d recorded an EP. We’d been on stage with Eddie and the Hot Rods, with The Troggs, with Yeti, with The Draytones. We had — as the NME would shortly note in print — already begun to “make a sizeable dent in a competitive scene”. By any reasonable measure, we were a proper band.

But we didn’t look like one. We walked into venues in whatever we’d happened to leave the house in that morning. Work shirts. Four blokes who’d come straight from the office and grabbed something off the back of a chair - or much worse - something we thought looked good on stage.

The diary, on what we did with the verdict:

Criticism is, of course, much better for us than sycophantism, so we took away what he said (with a portion of salt) and certainly agreed about our image and took action to sort that out!

The Red Album homework we politely ignored — we were already huge Beatles fans and we liked our song structures, thanks very much. The image stuff went straight in.

Jonno and I found them in…um…Zara. Not the most hedonistic rock and roll dens (until we walked in). Months later, in The Argus, the Brighton paper of all places, I told a journalist called Bella Todd that the jackets had been found “somewhere in Camden.” because that sounded much cooler. We bought four identical jackets, off the rack, that afternoon.

The diary on the moment itself:

The plan was to bring something OUTRAGEOUS to rehearsal the following week (Alex had some excellent purple flares and a hat) — but Jonno and I stumbled across some fantastic beige jackets in Zara which we bought immediately as they look great… and the others were impressed as well (amazing – they instantly agreed, which was unexpected and quite unusual for The Foxes) and we all wear them now, agreeing that we’ll customise other parts of ourselves.

Two things to enjoy in that entry.

First: Alex’s purple flares and a hat. If I had photos of these flares, I WOULD share them. Six months later, Bella Todd at The Argus would mention “baggy purple jeans” as one of “a long line of ill-fated attempts to find eye-catching matching stage clobber” — so it wasn’t a one-off; the purple was a recurring proposition Alex kept floating, and the rest of us kept declining.

Second: the jackets themselves. Beige, says the diary. Cream, possibly. Within weeks they would, in print, be described as “matching white jackets” — a fan-writer’s account later that year called them our trade mark matching white jackets. Stage lighting will do that. Memory will do that. The diary is the diary, and the diary says beige. I’m a man and can only see in basic colours anyway2 (feel free to give your opinion!)

And the bit that genuinely surprised me, reading the entry back, was “the others were impressed as well (amazing – they instantly agreed, which was unexpected and quite unusual for The Foxes).” Four men with very different ideas about everything — set lists, song structures, which gigs to play, poster designs — agreed instantly that this was the look. In Foxes terms, that was approximately equivalent to landing a man on Mars.

We now had a uniform.

A week later, we drove up the M40 to Digbeth.

The Medicine Bar was a much-loved Birmingham indie venue — now closed3, as so many venues are — tucked behind The Custard Factory. Salvo was a Birmingham listings magazine — now defunct, as so many music magazines are — that put on showcase nights for unsigned bands. We were on a bill with a handful of others. None of our friends from London were coming.

We put the jackets on.

The diary, twelve days after the gig:

We played at The Medicine Bar in Birmingham for Salvo Magazine which went AMAZINGLY well. It was the first time we’d worn the jackets (as above) and we really ‘felt’ like a band, rather than just a bunch of twats going up to play (see several other groups from that night!) People were really friendly too, which is always a shock coming from London. Two random girls turned up from Myspace, and they’re going to flyer for our headline gig at The Barfly in Birmingham when we play there in May.

This is something I think I underestimated at the time and most appreciate now: the psychological difference of putting the jackets on.

We walked on stage in Birmingham as a band. Not four blokes the bar manager had asked to plug in. We ‘othered’ ourselves. The crowd noticed. We noticed. The other bands on the bill — who, in the diary’s brutal phrase, were just a bunch of twats going up to play — looked, by comparison, like exactly that.

So in retrospect, thank you Jo for your honesty! Imagine if the purple trousers had won…

The jackets, in their first outing, had done what jackets do. They had told the room we were serious before we’d played a note.

In the audience that night had been a woman called Sian, who liked what she saw enough to give me the email address of a man called John who ran an internet radio show called Monochrome Museum. (Internet radio in March 2007 was very much its own thing, somewhere between pirate radio, a fan website, and a Geocities page. I loved it.) I emailed John on the morning of 6 March, two days after the Medicine Bar gig and eight days before Death Disco, with the new Foxes spiel and a copy of Lover, Killer.

Five days later, at 10:28 on the morning of 11 March, John emailed back:

From: monochrome museum
Date: 11 March 2007, 10:28
To: thefoxesband@hotmail.com
Subject: SHOW 63

hi all, just your normal email, show 63 is now on our main site, featuring music by
TOXIC ( NORWAY )
THE FOXES
JOE POP ( DETROIT )
PAGE 44
NINE MORE LINES
WHITE OWL ( RUSSIA )
THE DASTARDS

Please support the artists and the show by having a listen and vote for your fave artist on our guest book for Top Of The bats
Much Love To You All

Moll & John xx

The Foxes, between Toxic from Norway and Joe Pop from Detroit. Internet radio, March 2007. Global music and mayhem. It cost us nothing and reached, if I had to guess, somewhere between eleven and fourteen people. Maybe even more.

Here’s our bit:

It was also, in its small way, the first piece of evidence that the gig in the new jackets had worked. A stranger had seen us, liked us enough to recommend us, and a different stranger on a different continent of the internet had given us three minutes of airtime.

Three days after that email, on Wednesday 14 March 2007, we headlined Alan McGee’s Death Disco at the Notting Hill Arts Club in the new beige (?) jackets.

A man called Joe Trivigno walked up to us at the bar afterwards and offered us America. Which was nice.

Next week: Three strangers in one night offer us the Koko, America, and China. I deliver a CD by hand to the man who signed The Sex Pistols.

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