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Photos from the Scaremongers gig at Ilkley Literature Festival:
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.
After a suitably extended laurel-resting period following the triumphant Shoreditch debut in May, the Scaremongers are to reconvene on stage once more. On Saturday 13 September they breach Offa’s Dyke to play the British Legion Hall in Presteigne on the Radnorshire/Herefordshire border, with support from The Mood Index and DJ-ing from Everything's Pointed At Now. Presteigne sits aptly for our purposes on the River Lugg – so all of you in the Welsh Marches with an ear for great music, etc., etc.
And a few short weeks later, on Saturday 18 October, Armitage, Smith & Co. play their first (already sold out) Yorkshire gig at the Ilkley Literature Festival (http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/user/index.php), amidst such luminaries as Louis de Bernieres, Lionel Shriver, Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer and Kate Adie (oh, and also Cherie Blair and Chris Patten). Rendition of local folk song about headwear-eschewing fell-walkers is unlikely.
A heads up, as they say in Shoreditch, for ScaremongersWatchers out there for a rarer than hen’s dentures TV appearance for our favourite Colne Valley Combo.
The BBC’s estimable flagship arts magazine, The Culture Show, returns on BBC2 on Tuesday 4 June at 10 pm and toppermost amongst its items is Mark Kermode (like Armitage, another alumnus of the old late night Mark Radcliffe Show) who ‘accompanies Simon at the ordeal of his first ever gig as the lead singer of the Scaremongers in super cool Shoreditch’. In this post-Top of the Pops/Whistle Test world this is surely as good as it gets. (For this viewer, apart from the obvious thrill of this televisual treat, we’ll be seeing if the footage of the now legendary Gramaphone Club gig corresponds with our memory of it — particularly as we were standing right next to the camera operator’s ear hole like supernumerary key grips or summat.) Anyway, catch the show on Tuesday — another accomplished first for the Scaremongers.
Neil S.
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.
