Comets Often Move Awkwardly

I collaborated in a number of bands with my brother. These included 91 Vibrations, which started life back in 1986 as a solo project with Tim guesting on a couple of tracks. The band was on hiatus between 1990 and 2012. After that we released one ep and one more album. By this point it was mostly Tim recording and me guesting on a few tracks.

After 91 Vibrations in their original incarnation fizzled out, there was briefly the time of C.O.M.A.

No one knew what C.O.M.A. stood for. Not even me, and I named the band. We made up many preposterous possible meanings – the worst of a bad bunch being Christians on Mega Acid. This one must’ve made it into a press release somewhere, because it was quoted in a review we got in Underground which was an indie music mag that existed briefly in the early 90s and could be bought at your local branch of W H Smiths.

The genesis of C.O.M.A. came from a break in at my brother’s house. He’d been away on holiday and thieves had forced their way in and stolen a bunch of stuff that included pretty much all of our music equipment. Among this had been some pretty unlikable digital synthesisers and the like, but also a cut price analogue Roland drum machine that had been my pride and joy, and that had featured prominently on the last 91 Vibrations album.

The house contents had been insured, so in time the stolen equipment was replaced by fresh stuff. It was a chance at a new beginning.

C.O.M.A. released a single record. A 7” with a black and white sleeve showing an abandoned car dumped at the bottom of a local canal. Three tracks. Recorded and mixed over a single weekend. Featuring only guitar, vocals and a beat that was provided by a cheap drum machine bought for less than £20 out of the Argos catalogue.

Lo-fi and raw had never sounded so lo-fi and raw.

It was a surprising triumph. We’d recorded records before that took months, that were ridiculously over engineered. Material that had some life when first created, but became soulless and lifeless and polished to the point of tedium.

The lead track, the A side, was a song called I Can’t Listen Anymore. It features the only vocal performance I’ve ever been proud of. I managed to affect a monotone menace that aped Robert Forster on early Go Betweens recordings. (These were themselves heavily influenced by Lou Reed’s work with The Velvet Underground). Tim’s guitar was tight and relentless, suitably distorted via a cheap amp. The drums pounded away artlessly in the background. The lyrics were brief and stream of conscious. Nonsense really. The song as a whole ran for about two minutes. The genius part was a middle eight that consisted of a radio being randomly tuned down the dial (you can hear the faintest echo of a line from Peter Starstedt’s 70s hit Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) at one point) set against some backwards guitar, before the drums and guitar proper crash back in again.

The two tracks on the B side were nothing special. I’d written the guitar part for one of them even though I couldn’t play the guitar. On the other Tim took the lead vocal – he had a stronger, deeper voice than mine, one that wasn’t dissimilar in tone to Ian Curtis from Joy Division – but there was only a single repeated line to the song. We’d presumably run out of energy or inspiration or time by then. Or maybe all three.

I think the weekend deadline was imposed by our lack of equipment. We’d hired a machine to master the recordings on to and those two days were all we had. Limitations are often great tools for creativity.

So this was sometime around 1990/ 1991 I would guess. Pre internet and all that jazz. We weren’t signed to a label, we released this kind of stuff ourselves. I don’t know how we promoted things or who we sent stuff too. I do know we got a positive review in a fanzine. I’m not sure how they found us – or we found them. The record was played on a French radio station. Even more bizarre. Where did they find it? How did we find out they’d played us?

Making and distributing music is so easy these days that it sometimes seems insane to think how things got out to people back then. Without anyone else to do the work for you, without any promoters or record labels with connections to people in the industry. But that record did get heard and reviewed and played. And in Underground magazine – which you could buy in W H Smiths – there we were, mostly being mocked for that ludicrous Christians on Mega Acid thing.

Later on I came into contact with someone from the west coast of America who made music and ran a small distribution business selling obscure DIY 7” records. He liked our primitive little ep and so a box or two of them made their way across the pond. I’ve no idea how many were sold. I know we received a box or two of cool 7”s from the states in return. It seemed like a fair deal at the time.

C.O.M.A. were a one off. In time we gained some more equipment and recorded a few other bits and pieces on to a newly acquired (but 2^nd hand) eight track reel to reel tape machine. Nothing had quite the same impact. There were no tight deadlines to force us to keep things simple. Then Tim became a father and his priorities changed. Later I moved to Bristol and there was also distance between us that meant we no longer made music together.

But C.O.M.A. remained a happy memory. A blueprint for what could work and also a good reminder as to why so much of what had come before didn’t work. My only regret is that I never got to hear that lead song being played out on French radio. That would’ve been a real treat.