General »   BOB online

I'm looking forward to getting first reactions to the website. It's a work-in-progress, so all feedback appreciated. Other than that, feel free to talk about what yer like, innit?! Over to you...

ta ever so dearie for getting all this together - i'll chuck a link on the sombrero and dustysevens doohickeys and can't wait to start jetting through that demo list when you get round to them.

pleasure to see everyone out at the ethatone do - i had a blast and hope we can do it again
x

Blimey! Check out the Convenience video I've just put up on the site. Would love a copy of the Norwich gig for the archive, and would like to put a 'best of' of live vids on the site. I've got live recordings spanning 1986 to German gigs in the early 90s. I think I've fixed the site's email now...R

What a great video. We love the choreographed twirl and Dean's surprise at his 'discovery' at the end...

Ridiculous.

Will try and sort out sync problems. It's my dodgy rendering of the file for the webpage. I'll improve it sometime. Glad you like the video...it's been on my mum's shelf for 20 years. She posted it to me a couple of weeks ago because some guys were down here in Cornwall filmimg material for a piece about, amongst others, D H Lawrence, Patrick Heron and myself..!

The video may or may not end up in the film ;)

Also, Richard, when are these lovely demos getting uploaded? Some of these songs I recall from gigs from '89 and snatched set lists. I can hardly believe there's so much unreleased stuff in the can. I'm also amazed the band carried on till '95. All evidence at the time suggested you completely disappeared in '92. There was a planned gig at the Norwich Waterfront in Spring '92 which was cancelled, and that was that.

If you were still active, how come the touring petered out to nothing and you released no more records...? I assume the whole distribution nightmare was the reason. If only the internet existed back then. There was no chance for anyone to find out what was happening.

Hello! Glad the site is finally up and running - ahh, memories!

Think I'll stick my headphones on tomorrow at work and have a Bob kind of day... hurrah!

cheers

jo

Well, I'm glad you did continue to record. I'm sure there are some cracking tunes waiting to be aired. To my mind, the band's output from Convenience onwards just seemed to reach a new peak with every release. Hearing stuff like I Don't Know, Daymaker, Time And Again even now - those stand up with some of the best songs of the era. If you carried on progressing in that same vein, there must be some brilliant stuff sitting unheard.

As for the video, I'm pretty sure I did send it to you guys at the time. I recall calling the infamous extension Bob and getting an address, so someone did get it, but hey, that was nearly 18 years ago now!

From memory, it's mainly stuff from the album and latter day EPs, so My Blood Is Drink, Daymaker, Trousercide, Who You Are, Skylark III, Take Take Take, Tired, 95 Tears and the super rare Blue Boy, which I only heard the original of a year later during my Orange Juice obsession :)

Great set - the camera ran out of batteries a couple of songs before the end, but it's reasonable quality overall. The reason it got filmed at all is fairly lucky - I was away on holiday so loaned my gigantic videocamera to my friends to capture it for me - sadly they weren't all that adventurous with the filming, so it's often not zoomed in, which is a shame. Still, there can't be many live gigs in the wild, so I'm grateful- especially as you lot basically disappeared soon after.

Are there many others knocking around?

A big sorry to those of you who applied for forum membership and then encountered a big, loud NOTHING. Life got in the way, and I hadn't really expected anyone to find the unfinished site.

Very little has changed on the site, except that I've just put up, as a small thank you for your patience, a lo-res copy of the video for Convenience. I laughed my head off when I saw it for the first time in 20 years recently! Many thanks to Robin for his help in salvaging it from a neglected VHS tape. Lord knows how the demo tapes have fared; they've been dragged through some pretty dodgy accommodation over that score o' year.

Would love to read what you think of the vid. I guess I should stick it up on YouTube or something?

I expect to add more to site soon, life permitting...

Richard

Hi...I found out about the site around 2 AM...it was like travelling in time and watching BOB perform for me LIVE! Thanks for the music and looking forward to spending a few hours listening to your songs...especially the unreleased demos and live songs!

Jessel

Great site Richard! ;-)

I've been trying to find BOB on t'internet for years and came across the site a while back but was one of those who registered an never heard anything! I book marked the site and today noticed there had been some activity!

Some of the demos are superb as is the Convenience video (which I have never seen before).

My wife and I have been big fans since the late 1980s. We saw you on several occasions in Leeds - one I think you were supporting Cud, and another when you were supported by The Rainkings (who were from Manchester and from what I recall their singer was the original singer from the Inspiral Carpets).

We've both still got our BOB sweatshirts that we bought at one of your gigs (however as it was the 'baggy' period at the time they are rather large and Nikki now uses hers for decorating - sorry!). Plus we've got some unused BOB stickers somewhere!

Leave The Straight Life Behind remains one of my favourite albums (and tracks) of all time.

I notice in the Complete Recordings section you have some tracks missing namely Sink and Esmerelda Brooklyn from the Esmerelda Brooklyn 12" and Many Strings, My Blood Is Drink (demo), Tired (demo) and Bocker Spammy (demo) from the Nothing For Something EP. If they are missing because you don't have copies I have those records in my collection and will gladly let you have copies of those tracks on MP3 for inclusion if you'd like.

Great work.

All the best

Tony

Thanks for the wonderful video! It was worth the 20 year wait. Why you guys never became the next Beatles is beyond me...Looking forward to creating my own BOB demo album(s?).

I was/am a bit of a hoarding bastard, so I certainly have a few bit of BOB memorabilia knocking around - mainly old Norwich Arts Centre tickets, posters, one or two pics and even set lists (and the aforementioned video from '91 as well!). One particular gig at the start of '89 lingers in the memory because it was I and three or four mates who stormed the stage during the encore, which culminated in us all falling into Dean's kit. Rock and roll.

Good times.

Happily I've managed to keep most of this stuff accessible, so scanning it all in shouldn't be difficult. Glad all the sessions have been preserved properly.

Incidentally, why were there no more sessions after 89? That would have been a great way to get material out there during the Rough Trade collapse.

And welcome back Simon!

Blimey. That'll give me something to think about whilst I tinker with the technology behind this forum!

If the forum starts displaying Fatal Error messages, try refreshing your browser before you start panicking.

I'd say that my favourite official RECORDING was Extension BOB Please from the 3rd Peel session.

As for my fave 5 released tunes, well...I'll have to get back to you on that one. ;)

Will also think thru that demo list.

Righto, fair question, although I have to say I don’t tend to play the records much, and the demos I’ve not heard since we re-mixed some about 10 years back. The ones we did came out pretty well, I seem to remember, but I’m looking forward to them all coming on to the site as much as anyone.
Any list I make now would probably be a different one tomorrow, but here goes...

BRIAN WILSON’S BED was written around the time we’d decided to do a flexidisc ; it’s short for a reason – you only have 5mins or so to play with and we wanted to squeeze 3 songs on there. The whole thing was done in a day at a little 8 Track studio under a music shop in Kennington that we’d used before in our previous band, and we had a right old laugh doing it. The flexi idea worked a treat; it got us onto the John Peel show, and we did a different version of this song for our first session. We left this one off Swagsack to make the flexi worth keeping and as a sort of thankyou to the fine souls who’d bought one.

WHAT A PERFORMANCE I like because we worked so hard on it . We used to go out dancing (and I use the term loosely) at a club on the Charing Cross Rd called A Different Kitchen, and we wanted do a record that we could imagine being played there. We rehearsed loads before we started gigging, so by the time we came to record the first 12” we were pretty tight – when we wanted an extended mix we just played the song again, only longer... I can’t remember if we had one or two sessions for the ep, but it was all done overnight to save money: we never had long enough in the studio for any of our records, but who does? When we did this one live we used to chuck random bits of other peoples’ songs in there, which had the effect of keeping it interesting and us on our toes: a bit Echo & the Bunnymen, but what can you do?

THE HIPPY GOES FISHING has a nice tune and some sweet guitar on it. I think that we’d learnt this one in rehearsals without making a demo first, which didn’t happen often ( is that right, Rich?), and there’s always something about the first recording of a song that’s hard to recapture – which might be one reason I’m sometimes a bit sniffy about the records- and this one behaved itself in the studio and just seemed to happen without making itself a pain.

TIRED isn’t my favourite record, but it’s a cool song that I always liked playing. The ep was recorded during the day this time, but any benefits of that were completely offset by us spending the night before the session trying to save some money and studio time by doing some of the pre production donkey work at a cheaper place. Sadly, the poor bloke they gave us there to engineer couldn’t get any of the machines to work, which meant we were left utterly jiggered before we even started and with more to do. By the time we were finished we were so ( oh the irony ) tired we weren’t seeing or hearing straight, which explains the decision to tittivate the mix by speeding the whole thing up a bit. That bugs me when I hear it now, but not enough to keep it off this list. It’s also got our contribution to the What’s The First Chord On A Hard Day’s Night ? debate... I was going to say here that I didn’t know why we did that, but of course both songs are about being knackered; no-one ever asked me before, so I’ve never had to work it out before now. That’s quite clever.

SKYLARK II – the long one that goes quiet/loud. It was written just before we recorded the album, and it’s partly nonsense but partly about my Grandma, who’s funeral I had to come back to London for during the sessions. It’s probably right that the sleeve of that record is none- more- black; Rich had ‘Saying Goodbye’ on there which came from a similar place, and there was other grim stuff in the air. Having said that, I think at the time we only went for that colour to stop it looking like Convenience while being fundamentally the same design, but it does fit. I like the shipping forecast on this (I never forgave Blur,though I know they’d never have heard this; any more than Barenaked Ladies heard BWB... ), and all the little sound effecty bits worked out well. The guitar solo’s alright too – the whole thing’s a bit shoe-gazey, but hey- those were different times, and we didn’t make a habit of it.

So there we are.

As for the demos, I have to say, Rich, that I’m missing the horrifyingly comprehensive list that’s recently vanished over the page, and I was planning to write a piece about each of my songs as they appeared on here; but necessarily off the top of my head we’ll have the Kirsty demo, Skylark (the Tired 12” version is from Banwell), Coquette, Say You’re Alone , & probably Don’t Kid.
There’s a load of others that came out really well, but that’s this afternoon’s list. I’ll show my working out another time.

Cheers, S.

Cheers Simon! ;-)

My top 5 go like this:

1. Leave The Straight Life Behind ('It Was Kevin' on the Peel sessions -just out of interest why the name change?)
2. Convenience
3. The Hippy Goes Fishing
4. Flagpole
5. Tired

Ah, yes- there are the demos. Whoops.

'Kevin' was always a temp. title: we always had more songs than names for them. There was an Alan Coren book lying around the studio in Banwell that we used to open at random, point a finger at, and bingo, our latest smash had a name. This usually had to happen while the final mix was going onto casette- we needed to write something on the box. This was one of those, and it stuck longer than it should -in fact it was always Kevin to us, but the album needed a title track...

S.

Website much updated today...please refresh your browsers or empty your caches, ladies and gentlemen! ;-)

Cheers for the new additions - keep them coming!

Hey hey!!

I kind of lost track of Bob (and myself) around the time of "Convenience" and only found this site after literally years of trying to hear "Brian Wilson's Bed" again. I used to see you at The Cricketers in the Oval and around London at the time of the Siddeleys and The Raw Herbs et al .... I don't know what I'm trying to say here really... just HOORAH! I love you guys - thanks for everything.

how's the convenience/youtube interface coming along dears? spreading the little treasure around would be a fine thing

More demos? You're spoiling us sir!

At this point in our lives we should be doing BOB cravats and smoking jackets, or something, surely?!

I've put a live BBC Radio Humberside session up for you all to hear, in case yer interested:

http://www.houseofteeth.co.uk/sessions.htm

Simon and I will be adding loadsa text to the various record, session, demo, live pages over the next few weeks, giving bits of background and reminiscence to the music. I'll start with the session page a bit later. For example, the extra voices you can hear on the Humberside session were courtesy of Alison (and Nick, I think) who were in a Hull band called The Penny Candles.

RvB X

Good work uploading that Humberside sessions. Absolute gold to hear a bunch of unreleased gems.

'Uphill Down' is quite obviously an early Esmerelda Brooklyn, so it's hard to hear it in the context of a 'new' song, but really interesting to hear.

'Demons' is lovely. Classic Bob in rare reflective mode, and wonderful to hear a lost track such as this.

'Terror tree' (arf) just shows what a roll you guys were on at the time that you could just bung out tracks instantly engaging as this and then promptly drop them without so much as an EP appearance.

As much as I still have a fondness for the jangly jolly 86/87 Bob, there's no doubt that it has dated. The later stuff has a timeless quality. Bring on the demos!

Good God. I have just seen The Twirl. I almost fell off my chair. It was like Buzby Berkeley meets the Shadows...in hell. Hello Simon. Hello Richard. Torquil here. This is an excellent site - nice work Mr Archivist. My favourite gig was on the MV Pearl Necklace or whatever it was called, becalmed in an eerie mist somewhere near Charlton, power cutting off whenever the sound level was raised above a polite cough, but band and audience ploughing nobly on. And who could ever forget Simon's for-one-night-only lounge lizard performance at the Cool Trout? Carry on.

just checked inside the sleeve of my Convenience 12" and i have the BOB newsletters from

Spring '89
Summer/Autumn '89
Winter '89
Spring '90

plus a promo poster for the Kirsty 12"

If you want scans of any of these just say the word..

hey, been a big fan for years, i remember hearing a peel session by accident, taped a bit of the song "smelly summer" and then thought "i want to hear more of this" so kept my ears open, i lived in finsbury park near where one or all of you lived, i remember seeing one of you in "fat harrys" pub off berriman rd but didnt have the guts to say hello, the only time i saw you live was at the bull + gate 92ish, distinctly as i always remember you played "teenage kicks" in the encore and i came back stage and simon was nice and approachable, i always remember where i bought your records as they meant a lot, great to see you on the internet finally and the myspace page was helpful with my requests now and again, sure theres more i can reminisce but i will again...."daymaker 2" off the airspace lp, still love it dearly, thanks lads and hope to chat again

Thanks for that Ally...stats tell me that there is a regular trickle of people finding us through you. No change there then!

Welcome, newyearruse...really good to hear from you. 'Twas I who lived in Finsbury Park, with my brother, and it was our flat that became BOB HQ. In later years, the office moved to Davey (road manager) and Dean's flat, also in Finsbury Park. Hmmmm, yes, Fat Harry's. A fine establishment..!

Do you still have a copy of Airspace II? I'm sure I don't and I'd be surprised if any of us do. As I remember it, we had to get a track to them at short notice whilst we were in a studio recording the Stride Up EP. We knocked off a quick monitor mix of Daymaker and that is what went on the Airspace II LP. The 'properly' mixed version came out a month or two later.

With hindsight, all the mixes from Stride Up were somewhat rushed (true of most of our releases...we always recorded up to the eleventh hour and then mixed in an hour or two) and would sound unbelievably better if I were to spend a day on each song...which is how I work now when mixing. Maybe one day...

Anyway, if you do have a copy of Airspace II it'd be great to get a copy of the version of Daymaker from it...I can add it to the archive. Hope to hear from you on that score :)

Bugger - found it now!

Richard--I have the Airspace II comp if you're still looking for that track...It's one of my prized possessions as that mix of Daymaker began my love affair with BOB, so I'd be more than happy to return the favor!


Bill

Hey Bill...would love to get a copy of Daymaker from your album! Do you have the technology to turn it into an MP3 and send it to me? Also, I've got a thumbnail of the sleeve somewhere...it's online somewhere I think, but it'd be great to get a shot of front and back if you've got a camera. Lemme know how you're fixed for that!

And, Chris, I'd love your scans too...especially the poster.

You're all dudes.

RvB x

thanks richard, sorry for late reply, i do have the airspace 2 lp so i will digi up the vinyl if i can before someone beats me to it, great lp that, i was a big st christopher fan at the time, i always remember when you lived in finsbury park, was your neighbour into metal as i went to his house once and he showed off a copy of "leave the life straight behind" you or your brother gave him and i was jealous but i ended up buying it in elephant and castle, the things we remember...another thing, there was a band on the circuit who i can find no information called "the singing ringing tree" who had a great tune called "good day good", did you ever bump into them as apparently there was another band with the same name from scotland but again no info, i wondered do they ring a bell to you....i think the solo in "daymaker 2" was the first i ever tried to learn, never good at solos anyway but loved it....how did you come up with the name "bob"? i'll have to compare both mixes to notice the difference, i'll do that, have a good day j

On a theme based on newyearuse's question about howw you came up with the name BOB, where did the idea of the BOB logo (based on the STP one) from Convenience onwards come from?

Cheers

Tony