Picture This!
Picture This! was a quantum leap forwards in terms of musicality for me, in view of the fact that they weren't utterly rubbish all of the time.
Indeed, at many gigs around Birmingham in the early '90s, we hardly sucked at all.
Picture This! eventually died of old age, quietly, in its sleep. Here's some demos:
Ou Est Le Mouton?
We recorded these songs on 16-track analog at Workshop studio in Redditch. Redditch is vile, but the studio was nice.
Far From My Family - We wrote this in one take, and recorded it similarly. Not a bad tune. Two whole chords!
Get Outta My Face - Our flagship number. Needs more swearing!
Isolation - This was a recycled version of a song that I'd originally written with Andy Hembry in the Cellarmen. It's alright, I 'spose. I've heard it far too many times.
Crazy Jane - This song was bollocks and was entirely made up. Then, several years later, I had a girlfriend called Jane and - guess what? Yeahhh! She was a freakin' mentalist... spooky or what?
Does It Matter - I bought a WahWah pedal and insisted that it be used. Hence this.
The Man From The Ministry - I have no idea what this song is about. It sounds like it ought to be a bit political, but it isn't.
We weren't rubbish!
We entered a battle-of-the-bands contest (a thing that pubs do to increase their beer sales).
Bizarrely, we won it. AND there were other bands there, too. And some of them were quite good. AND we didn't bribe anyone.
And we won it. Wierd.
Anyway, part of the prize was a day in a 24-track studio in Walsall, so we recorded this:
Get Outta My Face - yeah, that's right, one of the songs that we'd already paid to record somewhere else. I never said we were bright. This mp3 has been made from a fairly crappy cassette of the tune - if anyone has a better cut of this, let me know.