We all remember the moment, July 7 2007, 19.42pm. The world watched the ad break of Coronation Street.A smartly dressed but somewhat dishevelled looking Michael Barrymore came into view. He looked as if to speak, but he stopped himself, descending back into his own thoughts. Rousing his character he turned to the camera and began:
"Viewers, compatriots, [painful sigh] friends. I feel that I have a huge apology to make. I have shamed myself and am only now coming to the realisation for for years I have laboured under a very fundamental mistake. A known mistake. Something I should have admitted to earlier. I am truly sorry.
"For it appears that a hot spot is indeed a good spot. A hot spot can make your life a little bit better. So when you're in town next, do a search, find a hot spot and check the news, send some e-mails, watch Man to Man with Dean Learner. A hot spot is a good spot. A hot spot is. A. Good. Spot. I'm only sorry to have misled my people for so long."
Cut to black and, whilst audible sighs and sobs can still be heard in the background, the logo of TB Open Zone appears.
When the rioting ended and calm returned, many people realised how much modern society had descended into a pure stream of advertisements. Some took to consumerism, but Matthew Willows took to the past. Previously a member of the Velvet Trenchcoat Mafia, Willows decided to leave the world of 2 for 1 subculture and adopt a healthy 3 for 1 subculture instead.
The idea was steamprog. Previous media had made the steampunk sub-subgenre partially encompassing. The steampunk pioneers were interesting in making the mid to late Victorian period alive with the wonders of technology not as boring drawings and schematics but living, revolutionary concepts and machines that belched thick fog, made nasty noises and frequently blew apart. Often these machines and concepts had little grounding in fact or reality. Willows had no time for that.
Willows's aims was to create a band that was interested in boring drawings and schematics. He was interested in the way things worked and how that affected our everyday lives. He was a weird guy. The first songs he wrote focused on the way a cone lock nut is shaped after being tapped to create a helpful torque which is required to keep an engine together under high heat. In three songs he explained the engineering relationship from the point of view of the nut itself, the grease covered engine driver suffering under the pain of exposure to heat and haemorrhoids and the drivers mother, unable to claim assistance under The Poor Law Amendment Act, frittering away her lazy afternoons watching smoke trails on the horizon. The first song started with a small crack in the nut ("I think I'm cracking up, I think I'm going to spin out of control"), the last song ended with the engineer noticing and removing the nut ("ashes to ashes, carbon steel alloy to carbon steel alloy.") . The liner notes make clear that the nut now resides in the National Railway Museum in York, alongside a Beeching-era closure poster and a hip flash with GWR etched into it.
Willows himself compared the three song cycle to the realistic literature experiments of Emile Zola. Being dead, Zola could not comment but his family threatened to sue the pants off anyone caught comparing themselves favourably to their great granddad. Besides, the relatives said, nobody ended up dying in a painful and harrowing way, so it could not be anything like the work of the master himself.
Releasing the three songs as an self-issued EP, Willows had played all the instruments, done all of his own accounting and even acted as a groupie on more than occasion. When the requests for gigs started coming in, Willows decided to pull a band together. Eschewing the tradition of getting band members who can play instruments, Willows decided instead to hire people who looked the part and tried to teach them rudimentary instrumental skills in the weeks leading up the first gigs. To find a bunch of bearded train enthusiasts was not exactly the hard part. An ad in one of their journals of repute was enough to have two hundred fame-hungry, pie hungry, mutton chopped wannabe train drivers banging down Willow's door. The selection process was gruelling. Each contestant had to answer questions from one of the hardest tests known to man. At the end of the heat stages Willows asked the remaining steamers to compete in an eliminator challenge. John Fashanu was taken away for the important hosting duties on Deal or No Deal Nigeria to present and the whole thing was shown on Puff, the new UKTV network for men aged 45-90.
Eventually the band were chosen and Willows had to teach them some instruments. The washboard was easy and Cecil Parkin took to it nice and easy. Jack Skinner was given the harder task of playing Willows's cheap knockoff of Yuri Landman's Moodswinger. Let's just say he hit the instrument on occasion and no-one complained. Harry Lambert, the 'looker' of the group was given the ceremonial role of 'contributing to overall musical direction.' He also promised to cut himself on stage if anyone asked whether he was serious about his art. Nobody did. Whilst on stage he strummed a guitar that was not plugged into an amp and until the fifth gig was still had its cellophane pick guard protector on. Mr Orkindale rounded the line-up by trying to hit some drums. Denied drumsticks by Willows following a painful accident in practise, Orkindale took to slapping the drums and producing snare sounds by gently tapping the skin and side of the drum.
An early Willows-free performance on Later with Jools Holland did nothing to limit their reputation as acolytes and when a washed-up Willows finally decided to leave the band (following Lambert's serial womanising hitting the front of the Daily Record ("Fishwives! lock up your mothers!")) the band decided to carry on without the only person who could, you know, play music. Unsurprisingly, the music they produced was out of tune, out of key, in no particular time signature and the lyrics make increasingly less sense. They are currently supporting Sonic Youth.
Michael Barrymore is currently managing the internet advertising strategy for Mishka.
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