I never like to rehash old material. It shows that you’re running out of ideas, and you can never really top the original thing. Even greats like Eric and Ernie couldn’t do it. Check out this blinding ‘Christmas Dinner’ sketch, one of my personal favourites, from the 1970 BBC Christmas show (10 mins 40 secs)…
…and this poor remake of the same sketch with Jill Gascoine in their Christmas show for Thames ten years later in 1980.
Doesn’t stand up, does it?
Anyway, as much as I’d like it to be, the point of this post isn’t just to show you clips of Morecambe and Wise sketches. There will be more of that later. What I’m trying to say is – recycling your old material can never work out that well.
However, I’m going to break my own rule, just this once. Previously only available on Facebook, here is the first part of a kind of ‘band history’ of Corinthian Casuals that I started writing a couple of years ago. I came across it again recently, and I rather liked it, so I decided to put it up here for your delectation. I’ll post the second part tomorrow, and, if you’re lucky, I might just finish it one day.
My dad burst into the bathroom, eyes wide with excitement. A peculiar exercise at the best of times, but, seeing as I was actually in the bath at the time, even more confusing in this instance. However, his actions were soon all but justified.
“Stu, I’ve just got off the phone to a place called the Greyhound in Amesbury. They want you to play next month, and they’re going to give you £150!”
The journey to this point had begun for me personally in the winter of 2002, when my friend Craig Mackrell decided to buy a bass guitar. Naturally, because he was the only person I knew who played an instrument that wasn’t an electric guitar, we immediately formed a band, which we bravely called Prozac Coalition. That’s brave for two reasons. One, nobody knew what it meant (and, to this day, I still don’t know what we were trying to achieve), and two, it was crap.
Being the best friends that we were, we spent much of the following six months visiting each other’s houses and working out little pieces, both covers and originals. This definitely made a change from our preferred activity of making up unbeatable teams on the data editor in Champ Man 01/02. Somewhere in the depths of my bedroom cupboard there will still be a dusty old C90, recorded in my front room on the karaoke machine I got for Christmas when I was nine, of us trying out a guitar and bass only version of “More Life In A Tramp’s Vest” by our idols, Stereophonics. Similarly, I’m sure that somewhere in Craig’s possession lies the notebook in which we sketched out our song ideas, most notably the retrospectively horrifying “Pump That Hat”, which, rather predictably, only had one vocal line in it. Sadly for me, my songwriting hasn’t really come along that much in the seven years that have since passed.
Eventually, we got wind that another friend of ours, Lloyd Davies, was taking up the drums, and he was added to the line up. Unfortunately though, this was just about the last thing that we did under the Prozac Coalition name, as, despite rumours of an eponymous debut album sweeping the school, and Craig and I creating one hell of a website for the band one Sunday afternoon (http://web.archive.org/web/20031219104402/http://prozaccoalition.netfirms.com/), we just kind of stopped.
And we probably just went back to making up unbeatable teams on the data editor in Champ Man 01/02.
Fast forward now to late 2003. I’m in year ten, and I’m in T3, my tutorial room. My friend Phil Greenland has popped over from the drama studio, his tutor base, for some reason, and we’re shooting the breeze until the bell rings for the next lesson. Suddenly, during the course of the idle conversation, he produces a bright orange piece of paper from his rucksack.
“Hey Stu, did you see they’re asking for acts for the Christmas concert in a couple of weeks?”
“No.”
“Do you fancy doing it?”
“OK.”
Phil and I had now been playing guitar for some time, and regularly got together to practise and swap ideas. By this time, another friend of ours, Max Goff, had begun to play the bass, and, after a few run throughs together in the music room after lessons had ended, we felt confident enough to put ourselves forward to appear in the Corsham School Christmas Concert 2003 ©.
We duly went to see Mr Day the music teacher, who immediately informed us that we would be opening the show. No pressure on the young lads there then. As I remember it, the ensuing exchange happened something like this:
“OK, so it’s Stuart Joslin, Philip Greenland and Max Goff then – and do you have a name for the band at all?”
“Erm, yes…we’re called “Sweeter Than Brazil”.”
“Sorry…Sweeter Than what?”
We were buzzing like Furbies with dodgy batteries, and, a few days before the show, decided it would be a good idea if we got hold of some matching football shirts for us to wear on the night. Luckily, my father was, at the time, part of the back room staff at our local team, Corsham Town, and he obligingly obtained three shirts for us.
And so it was, that on the night of 12th December 2003, two days after my fifteenth birthday, me and my mates Phil and Max strode confidently on to the stage in S Block Hall in front of three hundred odd people, each wearing bright red, cerise-pattered nylon football shirts with “HONG KONG HOUSE” emblazoned across the front in inch high letters, and proceeded to begin a Christmas concert with probably the two most inappropriate songs for the occasion that we could find…
