You’re All Weird Festival Club 85 Hitchin 19-20 November 2022

When Mark Astronaut left this realm at the beginning of July it left a big hole in many people’s lives. His crowd-funded funeral was so well attended it filled the crematorium’s car park to capacity, and countless others watched the service online from around the world. At the following wake there was talk of organising a weekend festival in Mark’s honour later in the year, and You’re All Weird was the eventual result – two days of music at Club 85 in Hitchin featuring lots of bands and musicians who were in some way related to The Astronauts. Many of them had ex-Astronauts in their lineup, and the surviving current day Astronauts would play on both nights with various guest vocalists.

For someone like me, it sounded like the perfect weekend – a chance to hear some of Mark’s songs for what might be the last time they are performed live, and also a chance to get a few more autographs for my copy of the book about Mark and  his various bands. Only problem was, it clashed with this year’s Morecambe Punk Festival, for which I had bought tickets and accommodation just two days before the dates for You’re All Weird were announced. I was gutted. Okay, so I could cancel the hotel in Morecambe easily enough, but the tickets for the festival were non-refundable – or at least they were until there was a lineup change, at which point I could pretend they were the band I was going specifically to see and get my money back. So thank you, unknown band who pulled out a couple of weeks before the festival date. It was on. We were going to Hitchin.

At this point I offered to live stream the whole event, so anyone who couldn’t make it to Hitchin could at least watch it second hand on the internet. I’d never done anything like that before, but I had a video camera with Wi-Fi and streaming capabilities so I thought how hard can it be? I was planning to film a couple of the bands anyway, so it wouldn’t have made much difference if I filmed them all and the video data went off to some computer server somewhere at the same time as it was being recorded onto a memory card. That was the theory, anyway. But when I went onto the streaming website mentioned in the video camera’s manual it said the service had been discontinued three years earlier, so I had to find some other way of doing it.

A short Youtube video later I bought an HDMI to USB converter for 10 quid and was back in the game. When it arrived I wired it all up and gave it a test run on my main computer; it worked perfectly, except I was only getting mono sound. It turned out that was normal for a cheap device like the one I’d bought, but I already had a Tascam hand-held audio recorder that can double as a stereo USB microphone so I decided to use that as well. Then I thought well I can’t really lug a massive computer to Hitchin, so I’d better test it on my 20 year old laptop. That dropped more frames than it saved, but my son had a more modern one that was up to the task, and I arranged to borrow that for the weekend. He didn’t have a laptop bag though, so I put it in mine for transporting. (You may think this is a trivial thing to mention, but all will become apparent later.)

We went down to Hitchin on Friday so it wouldn’t be too much of a rush, and got there around 4pm. As usual, the satnav lady dropped us off in the vague vicinity of the hotel we were staying at, and we had to figure out the rest for ourselves. The hotel entrance was down a side alley which we missed the first time, then we had to make our way around the one way system to find it again. Dropped all our stuff off, went round the shops for a bit, then watched a bit of telly. The previous occupant of our room had forgot to sign out of Netflix, so we messed up their viewing recommendations by watching our stuff, and added random things to their watch list to confuse them.

Saturday came, as I expected it probably would, and I woke up to a message from Dom (Astronauts guitarist). Someone had set up a website for a live stream of the event and Club 85 had shared it on their Facebook page. “Is this you?” Dom wanted to know. No it wasn’t, it was some scammer fishing for email addresses, passwords, and credit card details. How they knew about the live stream I have no idea, because I only told three people I was going to do it – I didn’t want to put people off buying a ticket and being there in person, so I was going to announce it on the day. The link to the bogus live stream was deleted, but by then a few people had already shared it. I hope nobody was ripped off.

Anyway, after breakfast I decided to wear my Punk Rock Nursing Home T-shirt so anyone who wanted to say hello would recognise me, and we made our way to Club 85 with the laptop, camera, microphone, tripod, assorted cables, and a sandwich for later. This was about 12.30 and the event proper wasn’t due to start until 2pm, so Mrs Marcus left to go shopping while I set everything up on a couple of tables on the balcony next to the mixing desk. With hindsight I wish I’d taken a longer HDMI cable so I could position the camera a bit higher up to get above the heads of any giants standing in front of the stage, and the inevitable sea of telephone screens being held up by everyone else. But I suppose all that adds to the overall atmosphere of a gig, and the audience are an integral part of it anyway, so they deserve to be on the video too. I had already decided on a static full-stage shot rather than zooming/panning like I usually do – mainly because I wasn’t familiar enough with most of the bands playing to judge when to fast-pan back to the singer, but I was also a bit worried about the HDMI adapter falling out of the camera if I jerked it around too much – it was relatively heavy, stuck out about 3 inches, and there was only a 3mm connector to hold it in place.

Indignation Meeting started doing a sound check, which seemed a bit odd considering they weren’t playing until Sunday, but it was a good excuse to test the equipment and make sure everything was working okay so I started to stream it to my Facebook page. Incidentally, there’s an interesting story about Indignation Meeting. They are a father and son guitar/drums duo from Leeds, who are very obviously influenced by Blyth Power. The thirteen year old son is a singing drummer, some of their songs are about trains, and they sound a bit like a sort of chaotic version of early Blyth Power (which is a good thing). They also saw The Astronauts for the very first time in May 2022, their last appearance before Mark died, and have since started covering a lot of old Astronauts songs. Sometimes, and also on this occasion, they are joined on bass by Joseph Porter’s hairy son Hugo.

Incidentally, speaking of Mr Porter – I saw this bloke with black hair sitting on a chair, and I thought ‘He looks familiar, I wonder who he is.’ So I went over and asked if he used to be an Astronaut. “No,” he said. I asked him if he was a Metatron, remembering that one of those had black hair the last time I saw them, but that wasn’t him either. Well who are you, then? I said. “I’m from Blyth Power,” he replied, then I figured out who he was, even though he didn’t look much like Joseph Porter at all. Then I thought, ‘Well should I get him to sign my book?’ While Joseph was a recurring character in the book, he was never actually an Astronaut. Except there was talk of him and Mark playing acoustic sets together at one point in the 1990s, which got at least as far as the rehearsal stage before the idea was abandoned, so technically … yeah, I got him to sign it. Same reason I got Steve Lake to sign it later on, though he did actually play keyboards on an Astronauts song released on cassette in the early 1980s,  which technically makes him a de facto Astronaut whether he likes it or not. He said he liked the book, anyway – Mark had given him one at some point, which didn’t really surprise me because he had a habit of giving them away, or selling them to people for a quid or something daft like that. But that was who he was, he wasn’t really interested in money and didn’t like taking it from people who were probably struggling themselves. Which is fair enough, they were his copies so he could do whatever he wanted with them.

So yeah, the streaming test worked – I knew this because I went outside to check it on my portable telephone, and there it was where it was supposed to be – so I switched everything off and wandered over to the merch table to get a few souvenirs before the doors opened and everyone else snatched it all. It would have been like a wet dream come true for any eBay or Discogs seller – loads of rare Astronauts records and CDs at giveaway prices. I could have made a fortune buying it all and reselling it, but I just wanted one thing that used to belong to Mark Astronaut so I settled on a test pressing of the Baby Sings Folk Songs single and left the rest for someone else. I also picked up a couple of posters which I now need to find frames and wall space for, the obligatory T-shirt which everyone will point at and say “Who the fuck are they?” and a cloth bag with Mark’s face on it to keep them all in, which I have no idea what I will do with, but it was there so I bought one. If there was socks and underpants I would have bought those, too.

There was also boxes and boxes of random records, CDs, and DVDs that had been found in Mark’s flat – with even more boxes of the stuff piled up downstairs near the entrance. I was under orders not to mention this in the book, for fairly obvious reasons, but Mark used to buy such things from car boots and then sell them from his ever-present Sainsburys carrier bag wherever he went. If you’ve read the book, you will know that this is how he first met quite a few of the musicians who later joined The Astronauts. (If you haven’t read it yet, but intend to do so at some point in the future, apologies for the spoiler.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, Club 85 in Hitchin, waiting for the masses to arrive and the first day of the You’re All Weird festival to start. Dom made me an admin on the Astronauts Facebook page for the weekend so I could stream it as them rather than just me, but for some reason every time I tried to do that the ‘Go live’ button was greyed out. So the best I could do was stream it as me, then share it as The Astronauts after it had started. That seemed to work okay, so I switched it all off again and went looking for some more people to hassle for an autograph. Mrs Marcus came back at about 1.30, and the doors opened at 2pm. A few people wandered in, and when I saw activity on the stage I started the stream running and shared it to the relevant places. Bish bash bosh, as they say somewhere. Everything went well until about half an hour later.

A message popped up on the laptop, telling me the battery was nearly flat and that I should plug it into the mains immediately. Eh? What’s it on about, I thought, it’s already plugged into the mains. So I checked the cable hadn’t somehow fallen out of the back of the laptop (it wasn’t that), then asked if the extension cable they’d given me might be faulty. A tech guy checked it, said it was working perfectly, so it could only be the laptop’s charger. Dom must have noticed me panicking because he came over to see what was going on. Then Bob, the owner of Club 85, came over. I told them the laptop wasn’t charging, they offered to go and get a new charger from the shop. Then the tech guy took the charger away to test it and came back saying there was nothing wrong with it, so it must be something wrong with the laptop. Arse, I thought, I’ve broke my son’s laptop and I’ll have to pay to get it fixed. But worse than that, I’ve fucked up the streaming I told everyone I knew how to do. I could have plugged the HDMI to USB thing into my portable telephone’s charging socket and done it that way, but I doubt the battery would have lasted any longer than the one on the laptop, so we were a bit stuffed.

Fortunately Bob had a spare computer I could use, so the tech guy set that up for me. I just needed to download the streaming program (OBS Studio, in case anyone is wondering), set it up again, and plug in the camera and microphone. By then I’d missed the end of the first band, and the beginning of the second. Which is a shame, but not the complete disaster it could have been, and there was someone at the other side of the mixing desk filming everything anyway. The computer, being a lot slower than the laptop, dropped a few frames here and there, but at least it was better than nothing and the stream was live again. So that was a relief.

But I suppose you want to know about the music? Most of the bands did at least one Astronauts song, and some did several. MJ Moon (an ex-Astronaut, joined for a couple of songs by Angus Duprey, another ex-Astronaut) was on first and even had the disembodied voice of Mark Astronaut join him on stage for one of the songs, which brought a lump to my throat and probably a few others, too. Current Astronauts bassist Paul’s band Pun were next, a sort of drum and bass duo with added guitar, if that makes any sense – they were very bass-heavy, anyway, and I’m sure there’s a proper name for it but I don’t know what it is. Aloah Dead were a sort of male / female duo I’ve never heard of before, so I don’t know what their connection with The Astronauts is. I was actually in the toilet when they started, so it’s probably just as well a shot of the stage was streaming at the time. They didn’t do any of Mark’s songs, or at least none that I recognised.

Anthrax played in ukulele and bongo form, something I’ve never seen them do before so I don’t know how common this is, but I quite liked it and felt it suited their own songs, as well as their version of Donkey Riding. Not sure what fans of their usual rowdy stuff would have made of it all, though. Redmaxx, one of the bands with ex-Astronauts in their lineup, played as a cut down acoustic duo, and after that there was a 30 minute gap until the next band so I stopped the stream and switched everything off to give the camera a chance to cool down – while my current camcorder has never overheated, my previous one did at Rebellion one year, and refused to switch on for another 3 hours – something I didn’t want to take a chance on after the laptop incident.

The venue started to fill up while I ate my sandwich, and suddenly there seemed to be people everywhere – which is weird at an Astronauts gig, there was literally hundreds of them as opposed to the thirty or so who used to turn up while Mark was still alive. I mentioned it to Joseph Porter when I spotted him again later, and he agreed that it was somewhat odd, then joked about faking his own death to see if it would bring in bigger crowds for Blyth Power.

The Sell-Outs opened up the evening’s entertainment, and had reformed specifically for the event after a gap of about 15 years – or most of them anyway, they had a stand in guitarist (whose name I forget) because nobody seems to know what happened to the original one. For those who haven’t read the book, The Sell-Outs were a young teenage band Mark took under his wing in 2000, and their bassist Joe and drummer Lee later joined The Otters – who in turn became The Astronauts. Vocalist Helen also sang backing vocals with The Astronauts sometimes, and was the person responsible for organising the fundraiser for Mark’s funeral. I’m glad I got to see them, because it’s unlikely they will ever play again. Their contribution to the Astronauts theme was Books, from the often ignored Soon album.

Pog, who had released an EP of Astronauts songs for the occasion, were next and played a few songs from the EP along with their regular folky type stuff. I’ve seen them a few times now, always with The Astronauts, and they are starting to grow on me a bit now, but to be honest I preferred Anal Beard. The new EP is good though, so I’ll check out some of their other stuff in due course. Another band that is growing on me is Rites of Hadda, who are edging towards being one of my favourite live bands at the moment and I should probably check out some of their studio stuff too. If they ever play near you, go and see them, you’re in for a treat. They’re very theatrical, or at least the singer is, and Mrs Marcus (who is an expert on such things) says the songs are very Pagan, whatever that is. The first time I saw them was in That London when they played with Zounds and The Astronauts. The first one they played at that, I was convinced was going to be a cover of Everything Stops For Baby because it had a very similar opening, but it turned out to be something different. This time they did do Everything Stops For Baby, one of the better versions of that song I’ve heard, but they didn’t do whatever the other one was called, probably because it would have just confused me.

Then it was Astronauts time, with Joe back on keyboards once more, swapping over to his original bass now and again to give Paul a rest. I wasn’t sure whether it would work or not without Mark, but the songs still shone through with both Joe and Dom doing a song each, plus a series of guest vocalists – the lass from Aloha Dead, Wasp from Rites of Hadda, and Steve Lake from Zounds. My only real gripe was they all stood centre stage instead of at the side where they were supposed to be. Wasp gave another rendition of Everything Stops For Baby, followed by New Dixieland Blues, and Steve Lake got the biggest laugh when he walked onto the stage with a carrier bag and said he couldn’t hear himself in the monitor. Then he said something about the long haired guy holding the rest of the band back, which seemed a bit mean. Anyway, he did Protest Song and Young Man’s World. Wasp was back for the finale, Melissa’s Party, joined by loads of extra guitarists and an extra drummer (who I couldn’t see from where I stood). The stage ended up full of people bouncing around shouting ‘It’s fun time’ but for me the best vocals of the night were from Dom on Time To Roam. He said later it was the first time he’d ever done lead vocals, but you couldn’t tell.

Dom and Paul were back later with Zounds, a band who don’t really need any introduction here because they are almost as well known as The Astronauts and have been riding on Mark’s coat-tails since 1978. If you’ve ever seen them you can probably guess what they played, and you would be correct. Along with that, Joe played keyboards on Dancing, and MJ Moon, Rico Ford, and some other bloke called Chris Hollis joined in for a version of Still Talking which rounded off the evening.

While I was packing everything away, Angus Duprey came over and wanted to know where he could get a copy of the Astronauts book. I got him to sign my copy, then pointed at the merch table and said there was some over there, but he had to go for his train so I said I’d save him one for when he came back tomorrow. I didn’t actually grab him one until the next day, so it’s just as well they didn’t sell them all.

Sunday morning I thought I’d better have a look at my son’s laptop, to see if I could fix it. I pulled out the charger and saw straight away what I’d done wrong the day before – I’d plugged the charger from my own laptop into the back of his, and it was nowhere near strong enough to power a more modern machine. Why that charger was still in the bag, I don’t know. I thought I’d taken it out along with my laptop before I put his in the bag. Oh well, at least I didn’t have to fork out to get anything repaired. So I charged the laptop up and sent Bob and Dom a message to tell them it was working again.

I wore my Astronauts Constitution T-shirt, and when we left the hotel this bloke said “Astronauts” to me. I looked at him, saw he was wearing a Rites of Hadda shirt, and said “Rites of Hadda.” Then me, him, and our respective women talked for a bit about the bands we’d seen the previous day, and I asked if they’d bought the Astronauts book. “Yeah,” the bloke said, and Mrs Marcus said “Thanks.” “Oh, was it you who wrote it?” he asked, then said he remembered all my weirdly specific questions on Facebook while I was writing it, and bought it specifically to support me. Which was nice. I’ve forgot his name now, but if you’re reading this, cheers for the cider. Incidentally, I later found out Joe from The Astronauts and a few of my Facebook friends were staying at the same hotel, but we never bumped into each other.

When we got to Club 85 I had to explain to the tech guy what had gone wrong with the laptop, which he was suitably amused by. The computer was still set up for me, so I shunted it onto the floor under the table to make room for the laptop. Nobody seemed to be doing any sound checks, so I just did a test stream of an empty stage for a few minutes, then switched it all off while I waited for the doors to open. I saw Bob Green and Alan Cowley arrive, so I accosted them for an autograph. They were both a really big help with the book, especially the early chapters, which would have been a bit crap otherwise because Mark didn’t remember much, and I was looking forward to seeing each of their solo sets. In case you don’t know, they were both in the 1980 version of The Astronauts who recorded Peter Pan Hits The Suburbs, and have played with Mark on and off as Restricted Hours over the last few decades. Oddly enough, they are both better known for Johnny Curious and the Strangers* who released a single in 1978, and I asked Alan if there were any plans for a reunion. He laughed and said no, nobody would be interested in anything like that.

Bob Green was on first, and when he got on stage I set the live stream going. There was a kid sat near us with one of those massive computer tablet things. He looked about 12 and was with who I assume were his parents, and he pointed at the camera and said “Are you allowed to film in here?” I shrugged and said “Yeah, probably.” “That’s my granddad,” he said, pointing at Bob on the stage. “Oh yeah? Your granddad’s famous.” “Yeah I know,” he said, “and so am I.” Then he wandered off to film Bob on his massive computer tablet before I got chance to ask what he was famous for. He must have gone home after that, because I didn’t see him again. Bob played a mixture of his own songs and old Astronauts ones on acoustic guitar. I was hoping he would play The Last Great Rolling Stones Lick In The Sky, just so Mrs Marcus would know who he was, because that was one of the songs we used to play on Sunday afternoons in the early 1980s while we cleaned our flat. He didn’t play it, though.

Alan Cowley was next, and also played a mixture of his own songs and old Astronauts ones on an acoustic guitar, including Don’t Think About It, which he played at Mark’s funeral. It’s become quite an emotional song for me because of that, and every time I hear it I’m reminded of what we’ve all lost. It’s the same with the theme tune of Coronation Street. While he tried to play it down in the interview at the back of the book, I know it was his favourite TV show because he went on to talk about Ken Barlow for a good half hour, and I can’t help wondering what he would have had to say about Spider being a spycop. Does going after fashflakes make up for whatever else he’s done? It would have made for an interesting conversation, but sadly one we will never have.

Indignation Meeting I’ve already mentioned, so there’s no point repeating any of that other than to add they opened with Let In The Light (aka Big Blokes), an obscure Astronauts song from 1978 that few people would have heard of. I’ll be honest here, I didn’t recognise it at the time, it was only when I was looking at the video footage later that I realised what it was – even then I had to ask them to make sure. The original was recorded at the same time as the live tracks on Back To Sing For Free Again Soon, but didn’t make it onto the cassette. You can probably download it if you go looking, or at least listen to it on Youtube or whatever. They also did Indisputable Fact and All Sorts. They did admit that Mark had pretty much disowned Indisputable Fact and refused to ever play it again, but said they liked it anyway and I’m inclined to agree with them.

Ben Pie and Rico Ford have a long history with The Astronauts. Rico was the guitarist through most of the 1990s, While Ben was their live sound engineer. Ben’s late 1980s band, Ben Pie and the Pasties, also contained two other members who later became Astronauts – Luke Welch and David Woodward. But of course you already knew all that, so you are just wondering what their contribution to the weekend was? They both played guitars, and Ben sang a medley of Astronauts songs from In Defence of Compassion and Upfront and Sideways, closing with Revenge (aka Bailiffs, aka Petrol Bomb The Bailiffs), one of many unreleased songs from the 1990s lineup of The Astronauts, or ‘the lost generation’ as I call them. It’s such a shame nobody offered to fund recording studio time during that era. What I wouldn’t give for a time machine and a wad of cash.

At this point you are probably wondering why I haven’t mentioned the live stream for a long time. That’s because nothing major went wrong with it, and I left it running all day for a solid seven and a half hours without anything exploding. The internet went off for about a minute or so, but that happened between bands so nobody would have noticed unless they were actually watching it live. At one point a message popped up on the laptop telling me my son’s Just Eat order was on the way, which caused a few dropped frames and may or may not have resulted in a chime sound making it onto the stream, so if I ever do anything like this again I should probably try and remember to switch notifications off. Oh, and one drunken celebrity got perilously close to knocking the tripod off the table when he squeezed past it to talk to the sound engineer, but that was the full extent of any problems.

During the short intermission Steve Lake sat at the next table with a bag of chips smothered in vinegar which made me and probably everyone else nearby hungry. I wanted to go and get some myself, but the next band were about to start so I had to make do with a vegan roll from Greggs that I’d taken with me. Incidentally, does anyone know why fashflakes rage so much about vegan rolls? I didn’t get raged at, because obviously there were no fashflakes present at an Astronauts event, but I see them all the time on Facebook, just … raging. Especially on adverts for vegan stuff. It’s the same with gingerbread persons, why do they feel so threatened by such things?

Anyway, Rico was back again with The Metatrons, a female-fronted band I’ve seen play with The Astronauts a few times. They seemed a bit more subdued than usual, but did a cracking rendition of Constitution, the cover of which, you may remember, was on my T-shirt that day. And speaking of Constitution, this happened much later on in the night but since I’ve gone to so much effort to set the stage for it here, when Angus Duprey arrived he pointed at my shirt and said “That’s my single, I played drums on that!” He seemed really excited about seeing it on a shirt, and I suppose I would be too if I saw someone wearing (say) a Punk Rock Nursing Home T-shirt. He told me he’d bought a copy of the single the previous day, having lost his original copy years ago, so it’s probably just as well I didn’t grab it when I had the chance. When I gave him the book I’d saved for him he said “I don’t have any money, how can I pay you?” I couldn’t think of anything, so I just let him take it. I probably should have told him to buy one of my other books when he gets home, or review it somewhere, but that’s just a hindsight thing and he did post a photo of it on Facebook the following day so it’s all publicity anyway.

Steve Lake got up to introduce Blyth Power, who didn’t play any Astronauts songs but did do the one of theirs that mentions Mark. I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not, but Mark rated Blyth Power really highly when we got around to talking about other bands, and I’m wondering now if that was some sort of Christian thing? We never spoke about religion, I never even thought to ask, but looking back it’s pretty obvious he would have been brought up a Christian, what with his dad being a vicar and all that.

SMASH were apparently famous for a while in the mid 1990s, and Angus Duprey said a friend of his was only there to see them. I must admit, I stopped watching Top Of The Pops and reading music papers long before then, so they pretty much passed me by – I think The Exploited, or maybe Cockney Rejects, were the last of the pop-punk bands I saw. I only heard about SMASH through Mark, but when I looked them up on Youtube and the like they seemed okay – a bit like 1977 punk, as if Discharge never happened – there’s even a documentary about them on Amazon Prime, which is worth a watch. Trivia fans might like to know that the drummer of SMASH is the father of the drummer of The Astronauts – something which the documentary failed to mention. They also played a lot with The Astronauts in the mid-1980s when they were known as Smash At The Blues, and shared a bass player – again, this wasn’t mentioned in the documentary. Didn’t play anything by The Astronauts, but the last time I saw them Mark said they had a song which mentioned him. Don’t remember if they played that one or not.

Speaking of The Astronauts, they were on next (after Chris Ripple’s poem about a dead cat) and opened with Lee McFadden singing Old Songs. Apparently Lee is quite famous, though I only know him from Facebook and as ‘that bloke in a hat who is always at Astronauts gigs’. We’d spoken a few times at those gigs, it was actually him who gave me the idea of buying a Tascam recorder after I saw him with one, and we met again in the toilet just before he went on. I remember thinking after he’d gone that I should have reminded him the line should be ‘There ain’t much food in the larder’ rather than ‘there ain’t much room in the larder’ – a mistake which ended up on the record. Not that such things would matter to anyone except me and Mark’s ghost, or course. Lee added an extra verse at the end of the song, which was a really nice touch – play me one of them old songs, you know the ones that were writ by Mark Astronaut. Then Joe did Rabbits, and that bloke Chris Hollis (who you may remember from earlier) came up for bouncy versions of Behave Yourself and Getting Things Done (the latter also having the kid from Indignation Meeting jumping around and shouting ‘At least they’re getting things done’ at the appropriate times). Helen from the Sell-Outs sang the last two – Baby Sings Folk Songs and Midsummer Lullaby – both of which she used to do backing vocals on in recent years, so I probably should have got her to sign the book as well but it’s too late now.

RDF, who ended the weekend, are a band I’d never heard of until the Otters EP Songs Beginning With The Letter H came out – one of said letter H songs being Heresy and advertised as featuring Chris Bowsher. ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’ I remember asking on Facebook, and everyone being surprised that I didn’t know. There are probably people reading this right now and thinking ‘How could he not know who Chris Bowsher is?’ Well I didn’t. I did find out later, while researching the book, and it turned out his band RDF (Radical Dance Faction, a name which conjures up images of John Travolta prancing around in a disco, so would have put me off clicking on a YouTube link anyway) shared a lot of history with The Astronauts, as well as a few guitarists and backing vocalists over the decades. They’re not really my sort of thing, but I can see the attraction if you’re sat in a field somewhere smoking a spliff or three. A sort of boom boom boom deep bass reggae beat that vibrates inside your head, which I don’t mind sometimes when I’m in the right mood for it. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it that night, I’ll give it another chance when I am. I did get Chris to sign my book because of the Heresy thing, but he seemed very reluctant to do so. He wanted to know who I was, what I was going to do with it, and why it didn’t have my name on the cover. Just in case anyone else is interested in the answers – I wrote it, I keep it in a box and look at it now and again, and because a: I didn’t think anyone would care who wrote it, and b: because it would have spoiled the cover design.

So that was my weekend. I spoke to three of The Astronauts over the course of it, and they were all eager to do it all over again next year, probably on or around Mark Astronaut Day on 27 August and maybe even make it an annual event from then on. I hope they do, because those songs deserve to be heard live, and people deserve to hear them for the first time. It would also save me having to find a new favourite band to go on long distance road trips to see. While there obviously won’t be any new songs, there’s still hundreds of existing ones to choose from, so even if they played every week it would be at least a year before they had to do the same one twice. When the new album comes out, maybe they could play along to Mark’s vocal track and have a life size cardboard cut-out at the side of the stage (I’m assuming a hologram would be too expensive). It also occurred to me that there are still lots of songs that never got a studio recording, so maybe there could be one more album of those with different guest vocalists? Or a Mark Astronaut impersonator? Or just get a new singer, like Gong did? Dom or Wasp would get my vote.

Either way, as Lee McFadden said in the last line of his extra verse for Old Songs, Mark Astronaut will never die.

* I suppose you could argue Alan Cowley is more famous for the stuff he did with Kim Wilde, but as far as I am concerned you would be wrong.