#20- The Gaffer Tapes

No Pub Rock band ever managed to accidentally mimic mid sixties New York minimalism quite as successfully as The Gaffer Tapes. Their uncompromising and rigid approach to chord, tone and timbre set them apart from even their more extreme peers and made their once-promising careers flounder and crash. Where once the band stood firm, tough and adhesive, now only a sticky residue remains.

Incensed by the neo-prog music of Bunny F and the flailing locks of Rick Wakeman (officially The Most Hated Man in 1970s Music 19 years running (Jees, even his website stinks)) Martin "Ron"Wheatcroft and Errol "Eric" Bamford set about trying to reconnect music with the average working Joe. Joe was from Conisbrough and had the added advantage that he could play most of the drums. Snares gave him problem but the group reconciled this by declaring the snare drum to be too hoity toity for them anyway. "The kind of thing you'd see Sea Scouts Rattling on," declared a drunk Bamford in an interview in 1973.

Looking for a way to present simple, easy music for simple men and easy girls, Wheatcroft hit on the National Readership Survey classification of social grades. The band talked frankly at only wanting to be of interest to people in the C2, D and E grades. Surely then -so the tortured logic goes- they could only use these chords in all of their songs. D and E were easy enough -they would just play the major chords- but a problem presented itself when the band realised that C2 was only a pompous (and therefore excluded) term for Cadd9. They would not be prepared to work with just a jumped up, one name not good enough, double-barrelled, "look at moi" chord and so decided that they would instead work with the much more working class C7 and C5. C7 minus C5 was, of course, um, C2.

With the correct 4 chords in place the band decided that they could create songs for the first album. Naming each song after the chord combination used within proved somewhat difficult (especially as C7 and C5 were taken as a pair and the group allowed no deviation) but they had just enough permutations for a short but intense 6 song album. The tracklisting can be worked out using Key Stage 4 maths, but for those unlucky enough still to contend with this, the tracks were:

1. C7 C5, D, E (2:13)
   
2. C7 C5, E, D (3:12)
3. D, C7 C5, E (1:32)
   
4. D, E,C7 C5 (2:31)
   
5. E, C7 C5, D (3:21)
   
6. E, D, C7 C5 (1:23)

The album was assisted by the engineer being slightly deaf. Placing the potentiometer a little too high on every take, the music was beset by rich overtones and bizarre ringing noises at seemingly (and actually) random intervals. About half way through making the album Wheatcroft began to complain that the others were not playing the same chords as him. When they explained that Bamford was rooting the chords on his bass and Joe was playing the drums, Wheatcroft pulled a fit and stated that he was very close to declaring them "musical" and therefore out of the band.

Wheatcroft's suggestion was for Bamford to play the same chord on his bass as Wheatcroft was on his guitar and for the drums to be tuned to the same set of notes, so that Joe could switch between them and match the chords. The result is that from track 3 (D, C7 C5, E) onwards the band were trying to play exactly the same notes at the same time. Waterboarded logic but actually a lovely way to make increasingly good music.

The working men's clubs and smaller pubs in the greater-Doncaster were not impressed and showed this by turning the fruit machines up to a very high level. Bootleg copies of one gig where this happened (at the Warmsworth Arms, Woolworth Street, Warmsworth) started appearing at the more popular underground noise fayres, jamberees and carnivals. People schooled on The Theatre of Eternal Music listened and considered the work B- at best, with the fruit machine's version of the Steptoe and Son music gaining the most positive reviews. Still, the band managed to sell a few albums off the back of the resulting confusion and it allowed them time to contemplate what to do next.

Ever eager to ostracise and denounce inanimate objects and theoretical notions, Wheatcroft decided that the next album should be so easy to listen to that there should be only one chord, played through the whole album. The rest of the band grudgingly agreed and tried not to look too bored when he said that "only the intellectual and the poseur are interested in change." The resulting album "Mrs E's Beautiful Booze" relied on the whole band playing E major for 76 minutes -just enough to get a double album out of it. This time there were no "problems" with the recording sound and this time the revellers at Rotherham's bawdier hostelries realised they were watching something immense. Sounding like a runaway train recorded from the drivers perspective, the amounting wreck was to change the group dynamic and put an end to the insanity.

Realising that this was not what they had signed up for, Bamford and Joe decided to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. Before they knew it, they were sent off to fight in the Chadian-Lybian Conflict, defending Ati from wave after wave of brave but ultimately underarmed FROLINAT fighters. Joe had previously wondered why the words coup d'état were in French. He was confused no more and he became demoralised by what appeared to be hollow victory after hollow victory. Eventually, seeing nothing left for the average man to do, he became a playwright, extolling world peace and brotherhood between men in increasingly poor plays.

Unable to cope without Joe, their "voice of the workingman, taken recently to offering intellectual and petit-proletarian solutions," as Wheatcroft sentimentally rebuked, the band had little option but to change their names and identities. Bamford took to cleaning windows with a very large pole, which was going nowhere until the recent high-rise housing boom. He is now a millionaire, but not a multi-millionaire. Wheatcroft shouts at pigeons in the high street and is often told to move on by the constabulary.