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With characteristic modesty and grace comes news of the Scaremongers’ potentially ‘difficult second gig’.
As a kid growing up in the 1970s, Saturday evenings would mean waiting for the Football Post, the weekly sport supplement to the Nottingham Evening Post. Its unwavering hub of attention was, quite rightly, the fortunes of Forest, County, and maybe Mansfield Town and Lincoln City. But in the gutter margins would be the late kickoffs and scores wired in at the eleventh hour from the turbid realms of the non-league, a litany of lyrical names: high-born Shepshed Charterhouse, Ilkeston (sang out to the tune of Glen Campbell’s Galveston), remarkably unremarkable Alfreton Town, sodden-sounding Borrowash Victoria, folksy Brigg Town of the Midland League or the Northern Premier’s Hyde United, South Liverpool, Gainsborough Trinity. Waiting to hear of the Scaremongers’ adventures last Saturday night in the land of the poetic Thomases (Dylan, Edward, R.S., Mickey) conjured a similar childlike thrill. But maybe I should get out more.
Anyhow, Smith reports that the Presteigne audience was very appreciative, to the point of not rebuffing the band’s offer of playing two encores! Supported by silver anniversary-celebrating The Mood Index (author and friend of the Scaremongers Ian Marchant on vocals), the set list (surely itself now an object of veneration or an Ebay item) included the standards we know so well: Cardigan Girl, Less Is More, You Can Do Nowt Wrong In My Eyes; and rarer gems, airing in public for the first time: Cricketer’s Delight, Grouse Beater’s Boys Club, Derailleur (can you tell this band is the invention of wordsmiths?).
Next on the never ending tour: Ilkley with engineer/producer Steve Whitfield standing in for Glen on bass. News of that gig won’t be limited to the gutter margins.
Armitage and Smith have told how they had to wait till, well, middle youth, to realise the dreams of their pomp and form a band. In a not dissimilar way, I’ve waited 20 years to become a slavish band follower, adoring fan and vicarious pop-thrill-seeker…
Thursday 8 May 2008, the Gramaphone Club, Shoreditch, London. Been in a state of giddy anticipation for some time. A rare visit to the steaming capital to see our old mate and his new band — the Scaremongers. We walk out of sweltering evening streets, city swallows dipping round the lampposts, and into the dimly lit, crypt-like rooms — an updated image of the Cavern for sure, the walls sopping with the sweat of a hundred upstart bands. Immediately, there’s Smith, calm, authoritative, his smile as broad as the portico of Huddersfield station. He welcomes us and thanks us for coming in his ever-charming manner. He’s sticking to a solitary pint. Like Keith Richards someone says. My wife notices Armitage in the corner but she is uncharacteristically shy and gets into drink-ordering at the bar. I’ve already had a couple of pints; Smith introduces me to his chief bandmate, who’s understandably a touch nervous pre-gig and feeling laryngeally challenged; luckily he won’t have any registered any of the nonsense I spout at him. A fine fellow, worthy of Smith.
In turn we meet other members of the Scaremongers in toto, all top guys and wait for the support act to wheel through its numbers.
9.45 pm: the seven Scaremongers are ranged across the stage, averting their collective headlight gaze from the expectant eyes of their new hardcore fans in the front rows, and the angling BBC camera. The first number, Cardigan Girl, an instant classic, and all is well. Smith has them marshalled and adept, quashing nerves, soothing qualms, fixing errant amps. Armitage proves himself a king in yet another arena, his north country timbre finding a perfect counterpart in Sue’s skylarking support. Seven or eight songs breezed through, and then the great finale, You Can Do Nothing Wrong in My Eyes. The music and lyrics, it’s the whole thing, the synchronization — it’s self-evident, an everyday miracle maybe, but how they do such things, so well, are beyond my envious grasp. Gaping Gill. I remember someone told me you could fit the whole of York Minster inside it. York Minster would be small-time for this band I reckon, but then I’m smitten.
It’s over, cheers ring out and another band has the unenviable task of following. We all drink more beer and talk of the night we’ve been a part of as if it’s already a grand memory.
In the 1980s, the sounds of the Smiths and others with their enchanting disenchantment rarely reached my bedroom door deep in rural Lincolnshire; Peel was only half-heard in stifled snatches. The musical tribal divisions in the small town where I went to school were archetypal, arrayed on the bus every morning: desperate grebos, balding-but-bequiffed rockers, disaffected remnant punks, a smattering of sullen goths (are there any other kind?), the odd mod, a phalanx of menacing soulboys with their aggressive suits and perfect hair. School rucksacks with band names inked inexpertly across the canvas. One lad even had a Mötorhead logoed jumper his mum had knitted him. At the time I liked to think I’d taken the road less travelled, back into past, to eras through which my folks had lived but from the sound of it hadn’t really been there at all. When I finally escaped to university, I found many such like minds and lost souls, refugees from the 80s demonic chart sounds of SAW and their ilk…
Spring 2007 and I’m listening to Mark Radcliffe’s late night radio show. With him is his oft-times guest Simon Armitage, poet, author, unhurried wit, a man I unwittingly spooked after a reading in Devon in the 90s by running up to him in the dark street as he left — I can still see his don’t-mug-me expression. Now he’s ruminating on the possibility of achieving a long-cherished dream — his own band. He mentions his old mate Craig …
I first knew Smith on the playing fields of Eton. Well, the five-a-side court in the crumbling concrete Fusion Centre in Elephant & Castle, southeast London, to be sure. A doughty opponent, solid in defence, incisive in attack, possessor of an old-fashioned shot seemingly learnt at the feet of Peter Lorimer. After pretending to be other such 70s heroes for an hour (most of the famed Forest team of that time in my case), many times we’d retire ruby-faced to the Hampton pub, sink a few ales and talk about the football and music, what else. Some years pass. I’ve left London but start to hear faint rumours about the nascent Scaremongers and their first tentative gurgles in the world. Of course, these rumours are from Smith himself. That first wonderful double A-side appears, another appearance on Radio Radcliffe, an article in the Weekend Guardian. All they needed now was a first gig. They’ve done it now, and they should be proud.
Neil S.
The Great Pete Ashton made The Scaremongers' Combined Days when he wrote the first online review - in fact, the first review of any kind - of The Scaremongers. Pete has always been a Diviner of the Zeitgeist and an Online Legend in my book, and he further wrote himself into The Scaremongers Story by also winning The Glorious Scaremongers' Facebook Group First Friend Challenge, for which he wins a bespoke t-shirt.
And The Scaremongers entered the national media for the first time in an interview Armitage gave to The Guardian Travel Section. To quote:
I've always been as interested in music as in literature. I'm just putting the finishing touches to a book called Gig, which is about growing up listening to music. I was a punk, a mod, a new romantic. The basic premise is that I became a writer through failing to become a rock star. I formed a band with an old school friend, Craig Smith, about two months ago, called The Scaremongers. Our single is out next week. That's given me the opportunity to live out some of these daydreams.
In this case, 'old school friend' is shorthand for 'a bloke at met at Peter Sansom's Poetry Workshops who was on the dole at the same time as me so we dossed about in the Merrye Englande together'!
In other news, Matt Padmore, Forest Fan and Darling of All Osaka, has become the first person to do The Scaremongers' MySpace/Facebook Friendship Double, an achievement of which even his hero Brian Clough would have been proud.
