Cassettes: What's So Bad About Being A Grown-Up

At the end of the 1996 I came to a great decision: I would no longer try to please anybody and would instead write songs about things I actually cared about, and sing them in my own voice rather than try and be something I wasn't. Funnily enough, this really worked! Over the Christmas and New Year period of 1996/97 I sat up in my loft and recorded this third tape, pretty much all of which, I think, was Quite Good. It featured songs like The Gay Train (in a very different version from the one on WE VALIDATE!), Bands From London (Are Shit), We'll See What We Can Do and, excitingly, my first single Work's All Right (If It's A Proper Job), as well as other ones like "What's So Bad About Being A Grown-Up", "We Grew Up In The Cold War" and "Maybe I'm Indecisive" which I played a lot live and still rather like.

Work's All Right (If It's A Proper Job) came about because of the song "Billy Jones Is Dead" which had appeared a couple of years before on Free At Last. My friend Mr Matthew Jones (formerly of The K-Stars) had always liked it and when he'd moved to London he'd played it to his flatmate Mr Sean Price, who was just starting up the record label Fortuna Pop! He asked if he could use the song for a work-themed EP he was putting together called Work Is A 4 Letter Word, but I'd never really been happy with the version I'd done back then, so asked if I could re-do it or supply another song of higher quality. "I've got loads of them!" I said, and then had to put the phone down and write one,. The re-done version of Billy Jones Is Dead later appeared on a compilation tape by the uk-indie mailing list, and is also on the multimedia bit of Warriors Of Nanpantan, but wasn't really all that good. Work's All Right (If It's A Proper Job) however came out Rather Nicely, and apparently still gets played every now and then in right-minded indie discos. I was really chuffed with it!