REDCARSGOFASTER ARE FUCKING DEAD

You do it to yourself.

In the end, it was an unlamented suicide; just another unmarked grave in the no mans land of could’ve-been contenders. A single cd and three seven-inch records comprised the wake. Like a shared but distant childhood memory of dutifully funeral bound second-cousins groping for some common ground on which to reminisce, redcars are destined to be but a fleeting thought for the few who heard or saw or, god forbid, bought a record. But a few is still some, and a fleeting thought still a thought. A million words have been wasted on a thousand bands only those who cared care to recall. A few more won’t hurt.

There’s a lot to be said for the practice of pointless creativity. Why else would anyone start a band? ‘Art for art’s sake’ may be a needlessly affected way of regurgitating that hoary old indie-rock cliché of ‘making music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus’, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. You start a band because its fun to make your own noise, to make something out of nothing just because you can. And then you discover it’s even more fun to inflict that noise on an unsuspecting public while gyrating your crotch in a petrified man’s face on a settee in Milton Keynes. Or while using a discarded office chair as a makeshift skateboard to rocket through a nonplussed crowd in a converted school hall in Bath.

The opinion of ‘anyone else’ generally ceases to matter when your bassist clambers offstage in Walsall, mid-song, and for some reason decides to block the entrance to the venue’s toilets, fighting off any brave soul who dare attempt to pass with the trusty sword of a Fender bass neck. It does tend to matter, it must be said, when you’re pinned up against a Manchester wall by a member of some god-awful troupe of Northern Monkeys™, put out, shall we say, by self-same bassist furiously flinging himself from a raised platform fifteen yards into their pile of the finest overpriced equipment hopelessly wasted major-label money can buy. That one was during the soul destroying A&R fest that is In the City. A religious holiday for opinions that, ultimately, don’t matter, that one.

If the good life is the discovery that it is the ‘moments’ that count, those ‘moments’ which suddenly appear, then dissolve, before you can really register that they were there at all, and yet somehow, in recollection, add up to so much more than the sum of their parts, then it is moments like these that will distinguish what I will label the ‘era of redcars’ in my own personal posterity. Or those times when, after hours locked in a rehearsal room fruitlessly scraping and scratching with fingers and thumbs a defiantly unyielding lump of solid musical granite, someone would come up with a chisel-like part that smashed it through the centre and brought it crashing down around our ears. Or else we gave up and played ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ for three quarters of an hour.



But, of course, it was not always thus. As soon as a modicum of success widens the world around a band so as to reach beyond and around that kernel of fun, the pointless but priceless expression of ‘creativity for the sake of it’ that everything else should always revolve around, then the risk of those twin party crashers, hope and expectation, racing in and destroying what you had, widens with it.

For, under the weight of hope and expectation, a good review is transformed from a source of welcome reassurance to one of introversive analysis, and the inevitable comparison with the last one that goes with it. A radio play leads no longer to the simple disbelieving pleasure it once provided, but instead to the tedious frustration of the wait for the next one. The self-perceived success of a gig begins to rest on the size and reaction of the crowd, rather than the performance itself. And it’s only after you’ve received the leg-up from ‘local’ to ‘hotly tipped’ that the realisation of just how many hundreds, if not thousands, of bands have already made the same journey hits you. Of a sudden you’re just another dot on a radar.

And so, for a while, we lost some of the fun. The music got better, the playing got better, the gigs got bigger. But so did the pressure. The troughs dug out by the things that didn’t quite happen, the acclaim that never quite arrived, the reviews that weren’t as fulsome as they might have been, started to undermine the peaks that being invited to, in essence, act like a bit of an idiot and make a lot of noise with your friends, in front of strangers who had freely chosen to come and watch you, had built. It was never total, those ‘moments’ described earlier still arrived thick and fast, but the pleasure was undeniably being hollowed out somewhat.

It’s a tough business.



It didn’t last long. Momentum is strange beast, and dissipates as quickly as it builds. You have your time under the glare of industry scrutiny, and luck, taste and trends do the rest. With hindsight, ‘it’, that bizarre and unpredictable process of push from below and, perhaps more importantly, pull from above that separates those who ‘make it’ from those who don’t, was never going to happen. We were too erratic, too aloof, too, to put it bluntly, idiotic. We released the wrong songs at the wrong time. We took too long to get good. We ripped Joy Division off too much, at precisely the same time as the entire indie-rock population of the world decided to do so as well. We also, as a rule, played terribly when the ‘important’ people were watching – so often, in fact, it almost became deliberate.

Did it matter? In the final analysis, not really.

Because it is not what an outsider might consider to be the triumphs of redcars’ fledgling ‘career’ which will stick with me when I look back on the past few years. As rewarding as hearing a song you concocted in a dilapidated Leicester rehearsal room that you’ve been using since you were twelve on the radio is, it doesn’t really compare to the downright hilarity of looking up from your guitar mid-gig to see your co-guitarist swinging frantically from a precariously attached lighting rig, as the utterly bemused audience dodge his flailing legs. Or the joyous beam on your brother’s face as a member of an ecstatic stage-invading crowd (in Chippenham, of all places) dismantles his drum kit and, raising the kick drum high above his head, threatens to smash it to splinters, before gently and politely placing it down on the floor. Or the time in Stockton, during what was possibly our single greatest performance, when Andy abandoned his bass and stood in the crowd, arms folded, declaring to all around him that ‘this band are shit’.

We weren’t.