When The Somethings and the Something Elses ruled the world - Part I

Secondary school. Cavan. Me and the lads had a band, and we tried real hard. It was the summer of '69. But Jimmy was shit, Jody caught rabies, I shoulda known we'd never get far, at least until we cut those two wankers and got some real artistes together. Yeah well, we would do just that, and how.

It wasn't so much a teenage fad as a sense of mission. We wanted to make real music. Real music that lasted and lingered, no smalltown bubblegum shit here. We had a voice and a message and zeal and panache and I tell you when we set free our funky new sound in the study hall that very first lunchtime, the air fizzed and crackled around us and those fifth year cats went wild, crazy wild. Even the nerds abandoned their homework and cut loose, throwing each other through windows and slapping themsevles around the room with their maths books. We looked at each other and just knew. We had it. We were going to make it for sure. We breathed in deep and said it loud: We were going to join the elite, and become Cavan's very first Something and the Something Elses band.

Now that hip-swinging sexmeister Big Tom and the Mainliners had got there first and was already whipping up a Something and the Something Elses storm up the road in Monaghan, so we needed a new brand and indentity to marry off to our fresh new sound. We liked Echo and the Bunnymen, for the sheer rabbit erotica and sexual potency of it, so we chanced along similar lines with Gecko and the Fannymen for a while. Eventually though, we settled on Terence and the Binliners.

Man we soared so high so fast in those early years our eyeballs rolled in our heads like a fruit machine. The people had been crying out for us for years, they just didn't know it until they actually got us. We tore up the Cavan scene. Hellfire, Cavan didn't even know it had a scene till we arrived and invented it, and reinvented it, painted it red from top to toe and tore it up all over again just for the almighty headfuck of it all. We ripped Cavan a whole new asshole.

(Incidentally, Cavan was officially at that stage the only county with two assholes, until Foster and Allen came along and equalled the feat for Westmeath.)

So we ripped and tore, soared and flew, living to gig, gigging to live. It was a sweaty, boozy, drugsy time man, totally fucked up. We first magicked our very own zeitgeist in 1970 when we played a memorable series of three gigs over a Bank Holiday weekend at a Scout Jamboree in Crossdoney. 'Woodchop' they called it. It all went totally ape when our tunes got into their hormones and then the fucking Girl Guides turned up and seventeen youngsters were hospitalized after injuries sustained while trying to figure out how to have sex with each other.

These were mental times. We rode the whirlwind baby, for the next three years. Then one night at a fundraiser to purchase pipecleaners for the Ballyhaise Chess and Draughts Society, John Joe on the bass got arrested for simulating oral sex into the microphone, although he maintains to this day he was just struggling with a gobstopper. Regardless, the Binliners were driven underground by the preachy Catholic majority. This had come just a few months after we had got in a backstage theological argument with a Jewish all-girl band, Phyllis and the Steins, and ended up making the wrong sort of headlines. We just laid low for a while and rode it out, holed ourselves up in a wood cabin on the shores of Lough Sheelin and wrote some new stuff.

The following spring we were back. Same funky sound, more mature with a rougher edge, and a new identity. Terence and the Binliners was a dead project, but Pervy Pete and the Pantyliners were here to take their place.

Teenage gigs were way too chaotic for us to handle now security-wise, man those crazy sonsofbitches and their chicks were wild just to get shocked from the sheer electric eels in crammed pants that was us. So we picked up a few wedding gigs, most notable of which involved a prominent Civil Servant in charge of the Government Statistics Office. The bride was a botanist with massive boobs called Annie and shit man with all those horny single gals there that night there wasn't a dry seat in the house when we played our stripped-down version of John Denver's Annie's Song. That godamn roof blew clean off with the surge of energy when we sang the first line: "You fill out my census, you're a bell-breasted florist."

Fucking wild times man, fucking wild times. But yet...the guys dreamed back to former glories and wanted back where the action was. Weddings, funerals and christenings were all well and good for putting Charlie on the table but we worked best in the broiling, pulsating thrusting sexpit scene we'd created ourselves years before

The decision was effectively taken for us in '76 when we played Amsterdam and lead guitarist Randy McPleurisy went crazy in the brothels and got into heavy debt to local loansharks, and the local fuzz were totally corrupt so we were sent home in disgrace. We had to take our medicine and let it all blow over so we quietly split the band up, but would come back triumphant just six months later with a new double album. Playing on our near-death experience of almost but not quite splitting up, we were now known as Kiefer and the Flatliners, but nobody got it because, eh, the film wouldn't be made for a further 20 years. So we quickly changed tack, changed all our names to Andrew by deed poll and seeking a more playful bent and new cultures, went on a tour of South American mountain villages calling ourselves........

Andys in the Andes.

We didn't know it then, but these would be our best years, because when we got back, it was to world that had moved on without us.


Part II coming soon....